The Scent of Trouble
by Caipora
Summary: Now COMPLETE. Slash, smut, skin, oh my! A weekend away goes awry when Hermione uses spells from the Restricted Shelves of Hogwarts Library to make golems and enchanted perfume. Warning: Mature themes, juvenile humor.
1. Up a Tree

The Scent of Trouble - Chapter 1/8 - Up a Tree   
Chapter 1/8 - **Up a tree **

"Darn it, Hermione! Why did you have to try enchanted perfume?" 

Ron Weasley hugged the tree trunk tighter as another growl rose from the darkness below. Only the faintest moonlight penetrated the dense shadow of the forest. Enough to show Ron the gleam of red eyes below, and enough for the eyes to see Ron's pale legs dangling just out of reach. 

"Don't blame Hermione. We all got into this together. Now we all need to find a way out." Harry's voice came from the darkness alongside, where he perched on a limb almost level with Ron's. Hermione's quiet sobs came from a branch above the boys. 

Ron knew that he could reach out and touch Harry, if he just had the courage to let go of the tree. Hearing Harry's voice was almost as reassuring as grasping his hand would be. And what he said made sense. 

Getting away from the school's protection for a weekend had been Harry's idea. Ron had magicked the butterbeer. Hermione had thought of the using the golems. But they'd agreed to those, all three. The perfume had been Hermione's idea, alone. And without the perfume they wouldn't have wound up in a tree in the dark, without wands or robes, and with a red-eyed something sharpening its claws on the trunk below. 

Ron thought back to when they'd planned this expedition. How simple it had seemed then. 

* * *

Early March is the end of winter, and when it seems winter will never end. Those who have seen many springs know that time will bring another. But for school children confined by an English winter to a building with traditionally English damp and drafts, spring seems an eternity away. 

Their ancestors had celebrated the spring solstice by dancing in the circle of Stonehenge. These modern mages, though, gathered around a fireplace in a nook of the Gryffindor common room, and plotted an escape from the circle of restrictions their elders placed about them. 

"We're never out of sight," Harry complained. "I know there have been problems. I understand that Dumbledore worries. But I can't even get up and go to the bathroom at night without stumbling over a ghost or a house-elf sent to check on me." 

Hermione giggled. "That's not just you. You should see what happens if one of the girls tries to leave the dorm at night. We just use the chamber pots." 

Harry's nose wrinkled. "That's gross." 

"You're thinking of Muggle chamber pots. A properly enchanted pot is neater than a water closet - and a lot quieter, too." 

"Darn it, it's not just at night. They're always keeping us away from things. We can't leave the grounds, we can't go into the Forest. There's that whole wing of the library we can't go into because the books are dangerous . . . Hermione? Are you all right?" 

Hermione's coughing fit ending in a few deep gasps for air. "The books on the Restricted Shelves mostly aren't dangerous, Harry. You're just not ready for them yet." 

"Well, how do you know? And what's in them, anyway?" Ron asked. 

Hermione reddened slightly. "The librarian says I'm mature enough for them. And when you're mature enough, I'll tell you what's in them." 

"C'mon, tell me." 

"Ron", said Harry "It's only another twenty minutes till lights out. You know how she gets. If she says she won't tell, she won't, so drop it." 

They sat in silence looking at the fire. Magic will do many things, but not central heating, and a stone castle heated by fireplaces is by turns too cold or too hot. After a day of drafty classrooms and draftier corridors, the three sat as close as they could to the fire. 

Harry slid from his chair and went over to the stone arch of the window. On the peaks of the highest of the hills beyond the Forbidden Forest moonlight glittered on a late snowfall. 

He turned and looked at the others. "What I really dream of is a weekend camping in the hills. When I was little I read about it in a magazine my uncle bought for Dudley, that he never even looked at. I read it along with the parakeet - the even numbered pages, anyway. I always wanted to spend a weekend in the hills in a tent, with no adults to say what to do or not to do." 

"My family has the tent we used at the Quiddich World Cup. I could ask my mother to send it up to me. The teachers don't watch me as carefully as they do Harry." 

"But how would we get away?" asked Hermione. "If we're not in the dorm at bedtime, Dumbledore will send the whole faculty after us." 

"We can't camp in the winter. It'd have to be just before the end of term. That gives us two months to plan a way to fool everyone and get away." 

The three looked at the window framing the distant moonlit hills. . 

"I say let's do it." The other two looked at Ron. "Just Saturday and Sunday. A night in the tent, two days of picnics. Just before end of term. Agreed?" 

They shook on it. There it rested for a month. Whenever the cold, the rain, and the constant homework got to be too much, Ron would think about the summer sun on a mountain meadow. 

At the end of March, the tent arrived in a bulky package from the Weasleys, trundled in by house-elves at breakfast. The parcel attracted no particular attention from the other students. Packages from home weren't rare, and the hall was swarming with owls delivering mail. 

Ron, Harry, and Hermione looked at the parcel. It was the first step. For Ron though it make the plan seem farther away, bringing it from the comfortable realm of fantasy to the real world, where obstacles didn't disappear with the wave of a wand. "The tent is easy. But we can't really get away. It's just a dream. " 

"I've been studying, and I think I've found a way." Hermione looked slightly smug and superior. 

"What did you come up with, Hermione?" asked Harry. "You know Dumbledore has seen student tricks since he studied here. It will have to be good to get around him." 

"I've been looking through the Restricted Shelves. There are things there that very few students ever see." 

"Spill it." said Ron. 

"There's no time now, we'll be late for Potions. But I'll give you one word." Hermione looked around, and when she leaned forward the boys did too. Even so they barely caught her whisper. "Golems." 

* * *

_Note the usual **disclaimer**s apply: characters are J.K. Rowling's and used without permission; you may archive if you tell me, if you do not charge, and if you include "author Caipora (o_caipora@hotmail.com)". _

**Content warning:** The last chapter is "NC17" or "R". Prior chapters may feature non-sexual nudity. There is potentially offensive material in earlier chapters; however if you are too young for it you won't understand it. 


	2. Golems

Chapter 2/8 - **Golems**

The third growling worried Ron. 

The first came from the thing at the foot of the tree. It had been there for hours now, circling, sharpening its claws on the trunk. The Forest's midnight gloom concealed all but its red eyes, but the carnivore breath wafting upwards reminded Ron of the thing's presence even when it was silent. 

Still, whatever it was, if it hadn't reached him by now it couldn't reach him or Harry, much lessHermione who was farther up the tree. It would only be a problem if they fell, and then only a brief one. 

When the thing arrived all the other Forest creatures had fled. The red-eyed thing had caught the slowest of them. It seemed to be a neat eater. The sound of crunching bones had gone on for a long, long time. Then the slobbering of its tongue, and a volcanic belch. 

The second growling came from Ron's own stomach. An adolescent boy's stomach doesn't care if the boy is one slip away from another creature's gullet. It only cares if it is empty or not. 

The picnic had been interrupted hours before, and they'd had to flee from their dinner to not be dinner themselves for the creatures of the Forest. 

Ron's stomach was not so much empty as emptied. The magicked butterbeer had been his idea, and not one of his better ones. It had given him the heaves, and the others as well. 

Ron now understood the expression "low man on the totem pole." If Hermione had at least aimed towards the other side of the tree . . . Not having his half-digested lunch in his stomach was bad, but being covered with Hermione's was worse. The smell was awful. But not enough to drown out that darn perfume. 

He groaned and hugged the tree harder. 

Then he heard the third growling again. 

"Hermione, tell your stomach to pipe down, will you?" 

"It's not my stomach, Ron. Harry?" 

"Not me either. It's thunder, and it's getting closer." 

Ron's usual optimism made a feeble attempt to assert itself. "Nothing wrong with a little rain on a warm night. At least it will wash Hermione's upchuck off me. Maybe it will wash off the perfume so we can do some magic again." 

"This early in the summer it's going to be cold rain, and if the air is warm on this side of the storm, it'll be cold on the other." Hermione was struggling to act normally too. 

"How can you prognosticate, Hermione?" 

"What do you mean, how can I prognosticate?" She sighed after a moment. "I forgot, Ron. You never studied anywhere but magic schools. A thunderstorm happens when a mass of warm air meets a mass of cold air. So if we're on the warm side now . . ." 

Ron thought about that. They were playing a waiting game. Eventually the beast below would tire and move off, the morning would come, or the enchanted perfume would wear off. But how long could they cling to the tree in a cold rain? All it took was a single slip. Goosebumps covered Ron's skin. 

Indeed, they were all that covered him. His clothes were back in Gryffindor Tower. His golem had worn his clothes home, and would be asleep in his warm bed now. How he envied it! And the golems had seemed like such a good idea. But so had the butterbeer and the camping trip itself. 

* * *

"Golems!" Hermione had said one morning a month ago, just before Potions. It was the only class they had together, and what with Quiddich practice and detention for turning Madame Trelawney's garters into garter snakes, the boys were unable to press her for details until just before lights-out in the Gryffindor common room. 

The small fireplace in the nook was theirs by right of occupation, as it had been for countless cliques before them. Privacy spells woven by generations of students had unraveled and intertwined so that they formed not a web but an impenetrable tangle. It was as good a place as any at Hogwarts to conspire. 

"What do you mean, 'golems'? What are they, and how do they let us sneak away for a weekend?" Ron leaned back in the deer-antler chair to the left of the fire, and glanced at Harry before turning what he thought of as a stern stare at Hermione. 

She suppressed a giggle; it was so cute the way he tried to make his eyebrows bigger and darker. It just didn't work with red eyebrows. "Even Muggles know what golems are. They're very old magic. Think of them as robots made of clay." 

"Robots?" Ron's expression was now one of genuine puzzlement. 

"Hermione, remember Ron wasn't raised by Muggles. Just talk magic. And please, explain it step by step. I've never heard of a golem either." 

"Sorry, Harry." She looked into the fire. When she spoke it was in the tone she used for delivering a report in class. "Golems are dolls make of clay and animated by magic. In classic magic they are full-size human simulacra, with more than human strength. They are most easily made in imitation of a living human. Blood, spit and hair of the original are mixed with clay to create the golem. 

"Depending on the spells used, the golem can be an almost perfect replica of the original, and if properly attuned can even speak and move as the person would." 

"A very good paper, Miss Granger." Harry applauded and Ron joined in. "But how can we get the spells? And what do you plan to do with the golems?" 

"Elementary, my dear Potter," said Hermione. "We go on a picnic on Saturday. We send three golems back at the end of the afternoon. We camp in the hills, the golems eat dinner and go to bed. In the morning, they come back to the hills and we turn them back to clay." 

"Could a golem really fool Dumbledore?" asked Ron. 

Hermione spread her hands. "How often do we see Dumbledore? There aren't any classes on weekends, so we don't have to worry about a golem answering questions from teachers or being asked to foresee its future in Divination." Hermione giggled. "Although 'to clay we will return' is the sort of gloomy prediction that would please Madame Trelawney." 

"It sound like a plan to me." Hermione and Ron looked at Harry, curled up in the worn dragon-leather armchair that had once been made for a giant. He started ticking off points on his fingers. "Everyone has learned not to bother us in this corner at night. No one is going to bother golems when they're in our beds. No one is at breakfast early on Sundays, not even teachers." He looked up. "If we can just the golems through Saturday dinner, we're O.K." 

"But . . . Hermione, if there's one think I've learned at Hogwarts, it's that there's always a catch. If golems were so great we'd see them all the time. So what's the problem with golems?" 

"For one, a golem has limited life. The spells that create it weaken the original. The longer the life the greater the weakness. Once the golem turns back to clay, the weakness passes. 

"Golems don't have to be human. There've been experiments animating golem dogs, golem rats, even golem ants. The basic golem spells handle the creature's instincts. The more the original relies on instinct the better the imitation. 

"The spells that make a golem **look** like a person are much better developed than the spells that make it **act** like a person. There are lots of different spells to make a golem look and feel exactly like a flesh-and-blood person. You can even use other spells so they take orders, just like you could animate a chair or a clock. Making it talk or act is where less work has been done, so the spells don't work nearly as well." 

Ron frowned. "Why have mages spent so much more work on appearance? I mean, what use is an exact copy of you if I have to keep giving it orders to do what I want it to do?" 

"Never **MIND**, Ron!" 

For a moment Ron thought Hermione had turned red, but it must have been the fire flaring up. And whatever made her mad? Girls were so hard to understand. 

"Hermione, so where don't the spells work well? Where could they go wrong?" 

_Harry too is single-minded_, Hermione thought, _and dense for someone otherwise so smart_. She silently counted to five in Latin. When she spoke her lecturing tone was back. 

"The spells transfer to the Golem what Freud called the id and the ego, but only very weakly copy the superego." 

"Freud? Is he at Durmstrang?" 

"Ron, forget I mentioned Freud." She counted again and thought. "Suppose I made a golem of you, and put a gooseberry pie in front of it. It would know that you like gooseberry pie very much, but it probably wouldn't remember that it's not polite to eat an entire pie. If the spells weren't done carefully, it might not even remember to use a knife and fork." She looked back and forth from Ron to Harry, trying to gauge what was understood. "It knows what you want to do, not what you should do. Like a three year old, or a spoiled brat." 

Harry nodded. "So if Draco came up to the golem at dinner and started something, while I would just move away, the golem might pop him one." 

"More like pop him two or three. Golems are **very** strong." 

Ron laughed, "I like it!" 

Harry smiled. "I like it too, but I'm afraid I know too well why I shouldn't always do what I like. We can't have the golems doing things that will get them hauled before Dumbledore. 

"Hermione, can you find out how we can give these golems as much 'superego' as possible? Ron and I will try to figure out a way the golems can skip dinner that night." Harry looked at the other two. "But I think you've hit it, golems are the answer. Are we agreed?" 

"I second it." 

"Ditto." 

The grandfather clock's chimes struck. Bedtime. Harry slid down from the giant's chair. "Hermione?" 

"Yes, Harry?" 

"I've never heard of golems before. Where did you read about them?" 

"There's a lot about them in the books on the Restricted Shelves." 

"What do people use them for?" 

"Never mind, Harry." Hermione sighed. "You wouldn't understand." 

* * *

_Note the usual **disclaimer**s apply: characters are J.K. Rowling's and used without permission; you may archive if you tell me, if you do not charge, and if you include "author Caipora (o_caipora@hotmail.com)". _

**Content warning:** The last chapter is "NC17" or "R". Prior chapters may feature non-sexual nudity. There is potentially offensive material in earlier chapters; however if you are too young for it you won't understand it. 


	3. Butterbeer

  
Chapter 3/8 - **Butterbeer **

_Just my luck_, thought Ron Weasley, _for a tree that has stood for two thousand years to get hit by lighting while I'm stuck in it_. 

The tree was there when Hogwarts was founded, , when the Normans conquered, when the last of the Roman legions marched away, leaving these hills to the Celtic magicians. Even in this ancient forest, it was a giant. 

Ron wondered if its last hour had come, as another flash of lighting penetrated the forest's gloom, followed almost immediately by a crack of thunder. 

The growling from the foot of the tree intensified with the approach of the storm. Either the lighting disturbed the red-eyed thing, or the glimpses it gave of the three children clinging to the tree just out of reach excited it. _Hope it likes its meat barbecued_, thought Ron, and lighting flashed again. 

"Ron! Harry! There's a hole in the trunk about twenty feet up!" 

"How big? Can we climb?" 

"I only saw it for a sec, but I think we could fit. And it's no worse than what we've climbed already." 

Ron groaned. "If it were any worse we'd have to be lizards to climb it. Where is it?" 

"Straight up from you and me." Hermione responded. 

"We'll never last all night in this storm. The rain will be here in a few minutes. Let's do it, and now." Harry's decisiveness made Ron feel better. "Ron, I'm going to climb around the trunk to you. Hermione, stay where you are till I say go." 

Ron wanted to say "Be careful", but knew it was unnecessary. 

Like any large tree, this one's limbs were few and far between. It was only climbable because the bark had thickened and fissured through the centuries. They'd climbed as far as they had by sticking their fingers and toes into crevices. At least there was one advantage to being barefoot. 

Soon Harry's hand, groping in the darkness, found Ron's, and then he was straddling the branch behind Ron. "Ron, wrap your legs around the branch as tightly as you can. Put your arm around me. Like this." Despite hours in the cold, Harry's arm still seemed warm across Ron's back as his hand grasped his ribs. Ron wondered if Harry could feel his heart beating faster. "Now you lean left and find a really good handhold with your left hand, and I'll lean right." 

A gust brought the first drops of rain. "Ron, now we both lean back. All set? O.K., Hermione, climb! If you fall we're set to catch you." 

Ron looked upwards, but Hermione was no more than a white blur, mostly blocked by the limb she'd been sitting on. The next flash of lighting showed her like a white X against the blackened bark. 

The flash after that showed nothing. _How could she have fallen_, Ron thought. Then came her call. "I'm up! Come on, there's a hollow in the trunk. It'll hold us all. Hurry!" 

"Harry, go on up. I'll wait here till you're in." 

"There's no time. The rain's here. We'll both go." 

"Together, then." Odd, Ron thought, that he felt happy, treed by a red-eyed thing in a thunderstorm. "But you go ahead and I'll watch your footholds." 

"O.K." Harry's hand gave the briefest of squeezes, and his arm moved up over Ron's head to find a handhold on the bark. His leg rubbed Ron's back as he swung off the branch. Soon he was moving upwards. 

Ron followed. Close behind he could see roughly where Harry's feet went. The ever more frequent lighting flashes helped, too. 

As they reached Hermione's branch the downpour arrived. Harry had waited for Ron, giving him a hand up. They clung to the trunk, Ron pressed against Harry. 

"The leaves won't hold off this rain for long. Let's go!" 

Harry was moving faster now, and Ron was hard put to keep pace. Water was already trickling down the trunk. Had it been a cliff they would surely have fallen, but the rough bark gave a surer grip than stone. Now Ron was grateful for the bark, in spite of all the cuts and scrapes it had given him on the climb up. 

By the time they reached the hole it was like climbing in a waterfall. 

Ron looked up. Harry's legs weren't there anymore. His heart pounded, but a flash of lightning showed two hands reaching for him, and Hermione's and Harry's heads nearly filling a hole in the bole of the ancient tree. Ron grabbed Harry's hand then Hermione's, and in a moment his head was in the hole, his weight resting on his elbows. 

Harry reached for his shoulders, but Ron shook his head. "Hang on a moment. It looks like we're safe now, and I really need a shower." 

Ron ducked his head back out of the hole, and let the frigid water running down the trunk sluice through his hair. 

The rain lashing against the leaves drowned out the growls of the red- eyed beast at the foot of the tree. It no longer worried Ron. A fall from here would be fatal even without the beast. 

The fresh cold rainwater seemed to wash away the remaining effects of the magicked butterbeer, just as it washed the filth from his hair. 

As the adrenaline rush from the climb passed, he felt weak. Hermione had warned that weakness was an effect of the spell that animated the golems. In the afternoon sun by the bank of the mountain stream, digging clay for the golems, they'd worried not at all about weakness. It had seemed as distant and abstract a problem as old age. 

But now that the immediate danger was past, he could give in to the tiredness. It was almost the same delicious sensation he'd had the winter the Durmstrang students had built what they called a "sauna" heated by a fire imp, and Ron had sweated as long as he could stand it and then jumped into a hole in the frozen lake. 

Still, the headache remained, and his stomach was knotted with both hunger and nausea. He couldn't even blame Hermione for throwing up all over him. He'd thrown up too, and she just happened to be above him in the tree. And the butterbeer was his idea. Ron vowed he would never drink again. What ever made him try that spell on the butterbeer? 

* * *

The idea had come in Hogsmeade several weeks before. 

Hermione, Harry and Ron were huddled over butterbeer in the tavern, discussing the different golem spells that Hermione had found in the books on the Restricted Shelves. 

So far they had not found any spell that would make a golem behave itself all the way through dinner. They'd dropped the problem for a bit, and were silently sipping their butterbeer and looking about the tavern. 

At the next table a wizarding family was trying to control two toddlers. Hermione had described a golem as behaving like a spoiled brat, and Ron tried to imagine a golem that looked just like him acting in the Hogwarts dining hall like the screaming four-year-old was acting a meter away. He shuddered. 

The toddler pushed over his father's drink. The wizard looked at his wife, and they rose. Each picked up one of their offspring and headed for the door. 

The odor wafting from the puddle on the neighboring table wasn't the rich toffee aroma of butterbeer. It wasn't even sweet. But it was tantalizing. Ron glanced around, and saw no one looking. He reached over, dipped a finger in the puddle, sniffed it, and licked it. 

"Harry! Hermione! Try this stuff!" 

"Not bad." Hermione said a moment later. "What is it?" 

"I don't know, but I like it too." Harry said. "You know, butterbeer is really good, but have you noticed that the teachers almost never drink it? They have the bartender mix them potions from the stuff in those bottles behind the bar." 

"I think some of this would be really great for the picnic." 

Hermione shook her head. "They don't sell it to kids, and if we were caught with it at school there'd be sure to be trouble." 

Ron dipped a finger into the puddle again. "There's got to be a way." 

While Harry and Hermione talked about golems, Ron's thoughts kept coming back to the potion on the table. He watched the adults coming into the tavern, and sure enough not a single one ordered butterbeer. It was always a potion from one of the bottles behind the bartender. 

"Ron!" Harry's hand was shaking his shoulder. "We've got to get back to school." 

"Sorry, Harry. I was thinking about the potions, and I've got an idea. Could you buy a dozen bottles of butterbeer to take back to school? If my idea doesn't work, we'll still have butterbeer for the picnic." 

"Sure, Ron." Harry's parents had left him plenty of gold in his vault at Gringott's. He saw no reason to be stingy with it. 

Carrying four bottles of butterbeer apiece left their arms aching by the time they reached Hogwarts. The bottles didn't hold that much butterbeer - only about a liter each - but the dwarf-made glass was irregular and thick. Dwarves could do beautiful work, but considered bottle-making beneath them, and consigned such work to the most inexperienced apprentices. 

The bottles were stashed under Ron's bed, and he spent unaccustomed hours in the library over the next several days. 

One night he arrived almost late to dinner, full of barely suppressed excitement. "I've found it! All those potions in the tavern have the same basic ingredient, and I've found a spell to make it!" 

"Let me see." Hermione demanded. Ron reluctantly surrendered several sheets of parchment covered with his scrawl. He'd finally gotten something out of the library that even Hermione didn't know about. 

His resentment melted as she smiled. "Good work, Ron. You not only found a spell that's easy to cast, but one with ingredients that are easy to get. So many spells need dragon's blood or something. But this is just sugar and yeast?" 

Ron nodded. Harry clapped him on the back. "The house elves can get that for us!" 

Hermione was still reading the sheets of spells. "It takes weeks, though. We don't have that long." 

Ron smiled. "Don't you remember that time-dilation spell we used last week in Potions?" 

"That's it!" Hermione leaned forward. For a moment Ron thought she would kiss him on the forehead. Then she settled back. "When will we do it?" 

"There's no Quiddich practice tomorrow. That will give us the whole afternoon." Harry paused a moment. "Let's use Moaning Myrtle's bathroom. Ron and I will carry the bottles down. Hermione, can you get sugar and yeast from the house elves and meet us there?" 

"No problem, Harry. Dobby won't tell." 

The first few bottles went badly. The first turned into very acceptable pancake syrup, with the toffee smell of butterbeer. But it had nothing of the aroma of the tavern's potions, and certainly wasn't drinkable. 

The second bottle exploded, drenching them with a yeasty liquid and scattering glass about the room. 

Ron and Harry took an oaken stall door off its hinges. Sugar, yeast, and bottle went into one of the bathtubs, and the heavy oak door went over it. Then Ron cast the spell. The next two bottles also exploded, but the mess was confined to the tub. 

After the fourth explosion they reread the parchment. 

"I think I see it." said Harry. "This spell is supposed to be done **before** the potion is bottled." 

"Well, I suppose we could open the bottles, pour them into one of the bathtubs, and cast the spell there. Then we just pour it back in," said Ron without much conviction, eyeing the layers of dust in the long-disused tubs. 

"Maybe if we could spell water out of the butterbeer, at the same time we spell in sugar and yeast?" Harry looked at Hermione. 

"A dehydration spell? That's easy. But we still won't know when we've got it right. Unless . . . there's a spell for testing purity. Let me think." 

The three of them cast spells over the next bottle. Hermione cast the transformation and time dilation spells, Ron the dehydration, and Harry cast the purity spell. 

The result was another explosion. 

"I'm sure we're getting, there, though. Hermione, maybe if we toned down the time spell?" 

"How far, Harry?" 

"Try it a quarter speed. If that works, we'll go faster next time." 

That bottle was a success. At the end of the process it glowed purple under the purity spell. 

The three looked downcast. Ron counted off on his fingers the explanation Snape had given the week before. "'Violet, indigo, blue, green, yellow, orange, red.' We're a long way from purity." 

"We'll do the same spell again on the same bottle," Harry declared. They did it, and then again, and again. Finally the bottle glowed green. 

"It's still not pure," Ron complained. "What does green mean, anyway?" 

Hermione's forehead wrinkled. "It's one of those funny measurements witches used to use. I asked Snape after class. I think he said green is 'one hundred proof'." 

"Well, if red is pure, this in only half pure, if that. It'll have to do, though." Harry decided. "The last repetition improved it hardly at all. Let's do the same procedure on the rest of the bottles. Ready, team?" 

They had only one more explosion. Harry surveyed the bathroom, littered with the remains of half of the dozen bottles they'd started with. "We'd better clean this mess up. It wouldn't be nice to Myrtle to leave it in her bathroom. Someone might smell it from the corridor, too. Let's hurry. We'd better change our robes before dinner, or the whole school will smell us, too." 

"Do you think that will be enough for the picnic?" Ron asked dubiously, looking at the six bottles of butterbeer. 

"I don't know," Hermione said, "It's only half pure, and it's only two bottles apiece." 

* * *

_Note the usual **disclaimer**s apply: characters are J.K. Rowling's and used without permission; you may archive if you tell me, if you do not charge, and if you include "author Caipora (o_caipora@hotmail.com)". _

**Content warning:** The last chapter is "NC17" or "R". Prior chapters may feature non-sexual nudity. There is potentially offensive material in earlier chapters; however if you are too young for it you won't understand it. 

This is Chapter 3 of 8. The rest will be posted as I finish minor revisions and add HTML 


	4. Minds in tune

  
Part 4/8 - **Muddy Minds**

Nothing can grow for centuries in an enchanted forest without gaining some measure of magic. 

The nature of a tree is to grow and to endure. As its roots year by year pushed deeper into the earth and its branches each spring reached higher into the sky, the tree absorbed the magic of the land and made it into its own. 

When the tree was young, when blue-painted druids danced in the grove, lightning had torn off one mighty bough. 

The tree in its slow vegetative way had learned of lighting. It felt its wound and its leaves fluttered in the summer sun and somehow spun a spell against the anger of storms. Lightning troubled the tree no longer. 

But termites live more quickly than trees, and they too burrow and climb. The wound grew through long years into a hollow in the heart of the tree, until the tree's slow magic hardened its substance and the insects found easier meals elsewhere. 

The hollow remained, for a tree has no way to regrow old wood, and its instincts could not weave a spell not in its nature. Through the centuries creatures found the hole and made it their home. Owls roosted there, squirrels stored nuts against the winter, generations of bobcats raised litters there until their breed was gone from these isles. 

Stranger creatures had made their homes in the hollow in the tree. Not for nothing was this known as the Forbidden Forest. Men who knew no magic learned not to enter the forest. Those who did rarely lived to exit it. 

In their own ways, chittering or purring, flying strange patterns under the full moon or running spirals about the trunk, each creature who lived in the hollow cast what magic it could to defend and bless its home. The charm of a chipmunk may be a small thing, the spell of a sparrow is admittedly more fragile than an eggshell. 

Grains of sand accumulating through centuries can build an island. So did tiny enchantments cling to the hollow in the tree, each the deepest desire of some small heart, beating under fur or feathers or scales, but always with the same message: "This is my home. Keep it safe. Shield my children. This is my place, this is home." 

* * *

Ron Weasley knew nothing of that. When Hermione and Harry pulled him into the hole, cold and wet but finally clean, he only knew a feeling of contentment. 

Tired and cold, he'd flopped into the hole. One hand had landed on something soft. _Hermione's . . . chest_, Ron thought desperately, _chest_. He twisted to the other side and landed in Harry's lap. That had happened before when their ankles had tangled in a soccer scrimmage, but then they'd been wearing shorts. 

"Wow you're cold! Sit over there and dry out!" Harry half pushed, half lifted Ron until he was sitting with his back to the bole of the tree, directly opposite the hole. 

"How are you, Ron?" Hermione's voice came from his left. The hollow was small, and the middle of it filled with a tangle of legs. Let me see, thought Ron, that shin my foot is on must be Hermione's, and that under my right knee is Harry's thigh. 

He was feeling woozy again, and shook his head to clear it. "I'm fine, Hermione. Just let me sit a little." 

The hollow offered no space to move away from the others. The warmth of their bare flesh pressing against his was welcome, but something about the closeness to Hermione confused him. Leaning against Harry felt strange, too. Maybe it was the darkness, or the insistent scent of perfume. 

Ron leaned back and shut his eyes. Now the darkness seemed normal. He breathed in slowly, once, then again. Something in the smell tickled a memory. He tried to shut out all sensation of his two friends, and concentrate on the tree. 

The hollow was dark and warm and dry. The trunk behind his back wasn't the rough bark that clothed the tree. Rather it was hardwood polished by centuries of fur. Dried vegetation crunched under him. 

Ron sniffed. Behind the cloying smell of Hermione's enchanted perfume, he found the odd scent again. There. Then it came flooding back to him. He'd smelled something like it on a visit to his grandparents' when he had been very small. He had left the boisterous games of his older brothers and climbed to the attic, where he had opened an old trunk. 

The smell was a mix of dust and old spices: autumn leaves and lavender, something of cedar shavings and pine needles and a faint musk of cat. Generations of birds and animals had built nests in the hollow of leaves and twigs gathered from the forest and the meadows around it. Some must have favored the same herbs that witches traveled to the Forest to collect. 

Thinking of Grandma's made Ron feel small again. The legs tangled with his were no longer disturbing. "Everything will be all right now, won't it Harry?" 

"We'll be all right, Ron. Something tells me we're safe here. The storm can't last, and neither can the night." He laughed. "Even that red-eyed thing that thought it had a three-course dinner is going to get wet and tired and go away." 

"We're going to be a bit crowded sleeping here," observed Hermione. 

_Odd_, thought Ron, _she sounds more eager than upset_. "I don't know about you, but after this afternoon, nothing could keep me from sleeping." 

"I believe you, Ron. I believe you." **Now** she sounded upset. Girls. 

"We're all right for the night," said Harry, "What worries me is the morning." 

"Why? If we could climb up at night, climbing down in the morning should be a cinch." 

"Ron, I'm not worried about our getting back to the camp. I'm worried about getting the golems up and out of Hogwarts early before anyone notices they're not us." 

"You're right. It was just blind luck we got them to the dorms before the connection broke. Hermione?" 

"What, Ron?" 

"Your enchanted perfume. Will it wear off by morning?" 

"I . . . I think so. The book said something about 'an unforgettable night'. So maybe it only lasts till dawn." 

Harry spoke up. "Are you sure, Hermione?" 

"Stop it, Harry! How can I be sure about anything that perfume will do!" She seemed about to sob. The boys waited. "I don't even know if the connection is just blocked, or if it's been broken." 

"Well, the last commands we gave were to stay in the dorms. They can't get into too much trouble in bed. " 

Ron thought back. Like everything about the picnic, the plan for keeping the golems under control had seemed foolproof. 

* * *

"We can attune them." Hermione said. 

"Attune them? Attune them how? Attune them to what?" Harry was feeling well. They all were. When Hermione spoke with that decisive tone, she'd solved a problem. And only one problem still imperiled their plans for the camping trip. 

Hermione had thought of using golems to conceal their overnight absence from Hogwarts. Ron had the idea of magicking butterbeer into the potion adults drank, and now six bottles nestled under his bed. Only half pure, but still it was the stuff that made grownups merry. 

Tomorrow Hagrid would show them through the hills above the Forbidden Forest, and they'd find the perfect spot. 

Controlling the golems was the problem. The golems had to act like them, not just look like them. Left to themselves the golems would to what they wanted to do, not what they should do. 

Hermione's tone said she must have found a way to make the golems behave. 

She wouldn't tell till coaxed by both of them. Ron knew that as well as Harry, so he picked up the cue. "Hermione, you've found a way to control the golems?" 

She looked around. As always, when these three retreated to the nook with the small fireplace the other Gryffindor students left them alone. She pulled a small tome bound in red leather from her book bag. 

Several parchments protruded, and she opened the volume to the first. 

"'Set the stuff of the golem close by her from whom it draweth its form, by day and by night, until the moon waneth from the half till it be dark, that her mind and heart may be impressed upon the clay, so when the spell be cast the copy be like unto the maid. Then the true mind may call to the shadow across great distance, and bend it to her will.' 

"Then it's got the spell." She smiled. "I'll bet a Muggle book this old would have everyone as "he". 

"It's so nice it's not sexist, Hermione, but how can we carry our weight in clay around with us for a week?" 

Another smile. "My uncle the lawyer says 'there's always a loophole'. Hang on, I marked it. 

"Here. '_As the goldsmith puts a king upon a coin, and the painter render a damsel's face in a locket that would not hold the nail of her least finger, the mage may make his seeming in miniature, and it be no less fine for that_.'" She looked up from the red book, and glanced at Harry, then Ron. 

"Great, Hermione, but how will we explain a Harry a foot tall? Tell everyone I took too hot a bath and shrank?" 

Hermione sat, impassive, and Ron spoke up. "Let me guess. Another whole loop?" 

"That's loophole, Ron. But yes, there is one." She ruffled the pages until she came to another parchment. "Um . . . yes. '_The golem, once made, may be made greater or lesser. But the spells need be cast anew, and if new clay be added, it need be from the same earth as the first. The golem may yet be formed into two and the charm cast again, making of the twin, twins, and the semblance fadeth not. But mark you that this brings great peril upon the maid that is the model, for the call upon her anima becomes not as two, but as four._' 

"All right, Hermione, I see it. We make small golems, and carry them around. Then when we camp, we make the full-size golems, mixing in the clay from the small ones. We send them back to Hogwarts for the night. They mostly do what we would do, and we can control them if they go off the rails." 

"That's about it, Harry. I found a few more shortcuts. The small golems don't have to be whole copies. They can be just heads, or just lumps. We only need the attuning spells on them, not the semblance spells." 

Ron spoke up, "How do we control them?" 

"The book says that if the golem's been attuned correctly, it's like controlling your own limbs. It just comes naturally." 

"Hermione, I don't believe that." 

She sighed. "Neither do I. But sometimes these old books are vague. I suppose we could practice with the little golems as soon as they're attuned" 

"How do we carry them?" Ron looked skeptical 

"The book says to carry it by your head to copy your thoughts, and by your heart to copy … well, your heart. In the book witches carry them in their hats." 

He laughed. "We'd look pretty darn silly wearing wizard's hats before we've graduated." 

"Well, we can put them in the pockets of our robes during the day, and on our pillows at night." 

Harry nodded. "The moon is waning now. Two days till half moon. Tomorrow we go to the hills with Hagrid, and Sunday morning we do the golem-heads. Any other problems?" 

"We've got to collect the clay in the hills, so when we make the full golems it'll all be from the same pit." 

"Anything else, Hermione? Ron?" Harry looked from one to the other as they shook their heads. 

"Hermione, you've done it again. Tomorrow we find our campsite, and in two weeks we'll be free for a whole weekend. No professors, no proctors, no parents." 

The clock struck. Ron hesitated a moment, then hugged Hermione before breaking away and heading for the stair. Hugging girls was, well, icky. But tonight Hermione deserved it. And, oddly, the smell of her hair kept coming to mind as he drifted off to sleep. 

* * *

_Note the usual **disclaimer**s apply: characters are J.K. Rowling's and used without permission; you may archive if you tell me, if you do not charge, and if you include "author Caipora (o_caipora@hotmail.com)". _

**Content warning:** The last chapter is "NC17" or "R". Prior chapters may feature non-sexual nudity. There is potentially offensive material in earlier chapters; however if you are too young for it you won't understand it. 

This is chapter 4 of 8; the othere will be posted as they are revised. 


	5. Golem Eggs

  
Part 5/8 - **Golem Eggs **

"How do puppies do it?" asked Ron Weasley. 

The hollow in the tree had over the centuries sheltered the young of many creatures. Chipmunks and mountain cats had suckled there; owls and winged lizards had hatched there. 

But for a litter of teenaged wizards, it was a crowded place to sleep. 

"Do what?" asked Harry. 

"Sleep all in a heap." 

"Maybe they can see what they're doing so they don't poke each other," grumbled Harry. 

"No, puppies are born with their eyes closed. Haven't you ever seen a litter?" Hermione asked. 

"Oh, right, how could I forget? I had to share the cupboard under the stairs at the Dursleys' with six newborn puppies and their mother one summer. But they've got fur at least. The golems wore our clothes back to Hogwarts." 

"Hey, it's no darker here than outside, and we're dry and warmer." Ron paused. "I'm hungry, but at least the magicked butterbeer left me feeling all warm inside, like I have a fire imp in my belly. Do you guys feel it?" 

"I do. I almost wish we'd hung on to one of the bottles." 

"Me too," said Hermione. "At first it was really hot in my stomach, like I'd swallowed molten gold. Now I'm just really warm all over, and it feels like the center of it is moving . . . downward." 

"Yeah. It was in my stomach, then behind my belly button, and if it keeps going it'll reach my legs soon," said Ron. He hesitated. "Do you think we're safe here?" 

"That red-eyed thing can't climb up after us, and it scared off anything else that might be able to have. As for magic, well, we can't use any until Hermione's perfume wears off. Still, use your head, Ron. This tree has been standing in the Forbidden Forest for a long, long time. It must be proof against most magic. And look at the hole - what do you see?" 

Ron looked, and lighting flashed again. It barely penetrated the hollow, but it lit up the curtain of rain streaming down the trunk and across the hole. Ron laughed. "Running water! Vampires and ghosts can't cross it, and it stops most spells!" 

"We're safe. We've just got to sleep." 

"Maybe if we tried another position," suggested Hermione, "Maybe if we curled up like fetuses, head to toe, in a circle . . ." 

"You keep saying that," said Ron, "and we tried that one. I wound up with Harry's feet in my face, and even after he'd run through all the mud in the Forest, I could still tell he doesn't wash his socks often enough." 

"Ron, you're no flower, either," Harry retorted. He stopped, and the others could hear him taking a deep breath. "Sorry, Ron. We're all tired. But Hermione's just trying to help." 

"I'm sorry, too, Harry. What do you want to try this time, Hermione?" 

"Let's try to imitate one of those ying and yang designs in Chinese spells, but with three." 

"Ying, yang, yong?" Harry interrupted. 

"I'll tell Cho you said that, Harry Potter! Now, you lie down with your legs along the trunk. Bend at the waist with your head towards the middle.". Hermione's **your** legs and feet behind me. 

They tossed and turned for a few minutes, each trying to find a position that kept another's knees out of his ribs. 

"How's that, boys?" 

"Better, Hermione." Harry's voice came from the darkness just forward of her navel, "It'll do. But I feel like a sardine in a circular tin. I even think I **smell** sardines. It almost makes me hungry. Any fish in your perfume?" 

"**NO**, Harry." 

Hermione sounded mad again. Ron almost said that he didn't smell fish, but kept silent. _What was bugging her now?_ He thought of his family's big tent with soft beds, pitched in the meadow where they'd planned to spend the night. 

They'd picked the site with Hagrid, two weeks before, the day they'd gathered the clay for the golem eggs. 

* * *

They'd taken the long route to the meadow in the hills. Hagrid had insisted on it. "You three will be going back to Hogwarts by yourselves, and I want ye to know a path that don't go through the Forbidden Forest." 

They'd acceded, following him along paths they wouldn't have seen without his help. Returning home should be no problem. However faint the trail Hagrid followed, the trail he left could be easily retraced, as his big hobnailed boots left deep tracks in the soft wet ground of spring. 

Despite the sun, the meadow was chilly. "Enjoy your picnic, now, and I'm expecting ye at me cottage by tea time. Else I'll come up here after ye with the hounds. Ye hear me?" 

"We'll see you for tea, Hagrid. Thanks so much." Hermione reached up and gave him a hug. 

Hagrid looked once again at the shovel Ron carried over his shoulder, then resolutely turned his gaze to Harry, who was carrying the picnic basket. Hagrid knew the three were up to more than a picnic, but if he didn't know what, he didn't need to try and stop them. 

They watched him stride away down the meadow, moving faster now that he did not need to hold his pace to theirs. When he turned and waved, they all waved back. 

As his disappeared into the fringes of the forest, Hermione started pacing around the clearing and pointing, her voice fading as she moved farther away. "This will be perfect! We can put the tent up over there by the stream, and make a ring for a fire with rocks Now, where shall we picnic today?" 

Ron looked at Harry and rolled his eyes. Harry rolled his eyes right back. Then he cupped his hands to his mouth and shouted, "Don't forget to pick out a spot for the latrine, Hermione!" 

Harry dropped the basket. "Come on, Little Miss Homemaker will take an hour to decide where to spread the picnic blanket. Let's look for clay." 

These hills were rich in potter's earth, and it was useful in many spells. So when one of their herb-gathering expeditions had taken them up into the hills the previous autumn, Professor Sprout had also shown them how to identify clay that would make a sound pot. 

Harry and Ron walked along the banks of the stream, pausing every now and then to dig a hole. They took turns testing the clay, grasping and squeezing a handful to see if it was too loose or two sticky. The spring earth was still cold and kneading it chilled their hands. The icy water of the stream left their hands clean but even colder. 

The sixth hole produced a clay just like Professor Sprout had shown them. Harry held open a small leather bag and Ron dug. The third shovel full of dirt filled the bag. 

"I'm looking forward to seeing Hermione do the spell. Let's go!" 

"Hang on, Harry. Let me rinse off the shovel." 

When they got back to the meadow, Hermione already had the picnic basket open. She hadn't unpacked the food, though. Rather she'd taken out the small bag that held what she needed for the spell. She was sitting on a rock by the stream, the sleeves of her robe rolled up, the sun sparkling off the implements spread out the rock beside her. 

Harry carried the bag over to the rock. "What took so long?" Hermione stood up as Harry opened the bag. She reached in, took a handful of clay, and squeezed. "Never mind, I know. You looked till you found the perfect clay." 

She make three piles of clay on the rock, each a double handful in size, and kneaded them, then with her thumb made a hole in the center of each. 

"Ron, we'll start with you. First, a lock of hair." She picked up a pair of silver scissors, and looked for a moment at his tangled red hair. She shook her head with a faint smile, and lifted her left hand. 

Ron stood still. Hermione's fingers were combing the hair behind his ear. One, twice three times the tips touched his scalp, the fingers then moving slowly outwards, pulling slightly on his hair. Her eyes were fixed on his. The hand with silver scissors rose, and for a moment Hermione's arm blocked her eyes. 

Ron blinked. The scissors snipped. The hands came away with a lock of red hair. 

Hermione turned to the rock. She put the red hair into a silver dish. He hand went to her pocket and came out with a box of ordinary Muggle matches. Leaning towards the dish she struck a match, but the light spring breeze was enough to put it out immediately. A second match met the same fate. Harry pulled out his wand and pointed. 

"No, Harry, we want as few excess spells as possible. This is tricky enough. Just stand over here and hold your robe out to block the breeze. There." The third match ignited the hair and it burned into a fine ash. 

She lifted the dish to Ron, and held it before him. "Spit." He worked his cheeks, and spat into the dish. "Again." 

"Now the hard part, Ron. Roll up your right sleeve." He did, then blanched as she put down the dish and picked up a sharply pointed dagger that shone silver in the sun. "Bend your elbow and clench your fist." 

"Aren't you just going to prick my finger?" 

Hermione shook her head. "We need more than that. Three thimbles of red blood, it says." She held his elbow with her left hand, and looked at his forearm as if she were trying to read his future. "Harry, pick up that small glass vial. Get ready to catch it as it drips from the blade." 

In a moment Harry was standing beside her, holding the vial, his glasses focused on Ron's arm. The campout didn't seem such a good idea to Ron as he looked at the dagger. 

Then Hermione's left hand squeezed as her right hand slid the point of the silver dagger into his arm. Red welled out, dripped down the dagger, and into the dish. Hermione waited for what seemed forever to Ron while his blood flowed into the vial. Finally she put her left thumb over the point of the blade, and withdrew it. She placed the blade carefully on the rock, then from her pocket drew a small paper packet which she opened with her teeth. 

"Is that a healing spell?" 

"Yes, Ron, but it takes about a day to work completely." She withdrew something from the packet and placed it over the wound. 

"I don't remember it from class. What's the name of the spell?" 

"Band-Aid, Ron." She looked at Harry, "Okay, now give me the vial." 

She poured the vial into the dish with the spit and the ash of the hair. Then she dumped it into the hole of the first ball of clay. She kneaded it and it slowly turned red, as did her hands. When the clay seemed uniform in color, she formed it into an egg. 

"Let me wash my hands, then we'll cast the spell." She picked up the vial, the dish, and the dagger, and took them to the stream, where she washed them, then rinsed them seven times. 

"Running water?" Ron asked. 

"You got it," said Hermione, as she dried her hands on her robe, "Now let's see. I've memorized it, but never hurts to read it again." She pulled the red book out of her pocket and opened it, running her finger down the page. She put it back in her pocket and took out the wand. "Here goes nothing." 

The spell was surprisingly brief. Ron looked at the clay egg. "Pick it up," said Hermione. 

It was heavy in his hand, and warm. _Like a sleeping puppy_, Ron thought. 

"Now we'll do mine. Harry, hold this mirror for me." She carefully clipped the ends of several locks of her hair, looking like a vain teenager and not a witch readying a spell. She burned the hair and spat in the dish. Instead of picking up the dagger, she pulled a corked vial from her pocket. The liquid inside was a deep red. 

"What, no dagger for you?" Ron asked. His arm still stung. 

"I collected a little before going to breakfast this morning," Hermione said. 

"How did you keep it from clotting? A preservative spell?" 

"Just a drop of vinegar, Ron. Even Muggles know that." 

"You stuck that dagger in all by yourself? But you don't even have a Band-Air spell on your arm.: 

"Never **MIND** how I got the blood, Ron!" Now she was turning pink. Girls were strange. 

* * *

Ron came half awake. Something was poking him in the neck. He slapped it sleepily. A yelp from Harry almost woke him up, but slumber called too strongly. He turned a little, and with the sound of the rain lulling him, slept again, and dreamed on. 

* * *

They were sitting by the fire in their nook in the common room, before the fireplace, the little lumps of clay in the pockets of their robes warm against their chests. 

"I don't feel weak at all," said Ron. 

"That's only an effect of the golem spell. Today we just attuned the clay to each of us. By the new moon, it will be fully linked. Then we can do the golem spell -- or other spells." 

Harry spoke up, "What other spells, Hermione?" 

"There's lots of things just in this book. For a voodoo doll, the linking procedure is just the same. So be careful not to lose the egg." 

"I won't. Imagine if Draco learned what it was and got it," Harry shuddered, "Once it's linked, how long do we have before we use it?" 

"Oh, it'll last for years and years. There's an unlinking spell we have to do, after we turn off the golems and they're just clay again. But it's really easy." 

"This egg is going to get mashed up a bit if I carry it around all week. Can't I put a preservative spell on it?" 

"No extra spells, Ron, I told you that by the stream. But you're right, it's a problem." She gazed into the fire, "I suppose we could bake them." 

"Bake them? Wouldn't that kill the magic?" 

"No, it's just a physical process, not a magical one. Let's bake the eggs." Hermione saw the hesitation on the faces of the others, "There's even a story in the book about a king who make a whole army that way. It's pretty long, but I liked it. I'll read it to you. Come on, I'll put mine in first." 

She put her egg on the hearth, then picked it up with the fire tongs and tucked it into the hottest part of the fire. Harry and then Ron did the same. They looked at the eggs in the fire. Hermione pulled out the book, and found the page. 

"A great magician told the king of China that he could make him an army of clay, like in form to his true army, but of great strength. He promised too the tiniest drop of blood from the king could be mixed into the clay, and so render each clay soldier utterly loyal and obedient to the King. 

"It would take years to assemble the army, the magician said, but for so great a boon the king was willing to wait. The soldiers were made, each one spelled to one of his real soldiers, like to him in form and face, and tied to him with magic. 

"So long would the task take that the first clay soldiers would dry and crumble before the last were ready. The magician took counsel with the king's architect, who called his maker of bricks. They found a clay that would take the spell and take the kiln, and baked one of the clay soldiers, finding the magic unchanged by the fire. 

"So through the years the magician commanded the king's brick makers who modeled, spelled and baked the golem army. Then came the day when the army was complete, from the least of the foot soldiers to the models of the king's generals. 

"The king came to the great storehouse where the army waited, and commanded the magician to pass the army in parade before him. 

"The magician gave the command to awaken the links that tied each golem to a soldier, and the army of seven thousand soldiers of clay woke and saluted. The king looked on them in delight. 

"The king's generals and the king's son looked on as well, but they knew little of magic and were struck with fear. 

"Then the magician uttered the second spell, which linked each and every golem to their master the king. But he had wrought a spell that was mightier than his understanding. Seven thousand golems drew each a tiny spark of life from the king, and the king fell down dead on the spot. 

"The king's son was a different sort of man than his father, and spoke much with warriors and with wizards not at all. He knew the generals feared the golem army, but they had feared his father more. 

"He drew his sword and ordered the wizard to return all the warriors to clay at once. The magician hesitated, for he knew that the generals hated him. The son saw his fear and pledged his word as king that he would not shed a drop of the wizard's blood, for he had been beloved of his father. But the magician must surrender his wand, his potions, and his books of magic. 

"The magician looked at how close the son's sword was, and how far the army of golems was, and he bowed to the son, then waved his wand at the army, and they were again clay. 

"The son then spoke to the generals. 'This army was the great dream of my father, and to honor him I declare that he shall be buried here, and all his golem army buried with him.' 

"The generals looked at the king's son, and they bowed, and declared him wise, and declared him king. 

"He commanded that the great storehouse be shut and the earth raised over it, and the generals drove the army of men to do so in three days and three nights. He commanded that a vast tomb be made for his father beside the vault of golems, and heaped in it great treasure of gold and jewels, but naught to drink or to eat, even though it was the custom of the land. 

"It was done. When the tomb was ready he had carried into it the body of his father who had been king. 

"Then called his generals, and commanded that the wizard too be placed in the tomb, and the doors walled up 'But do not shed a drop of the magician's blood, for I have pledged the word of the king'. And so it was done." 

Hermione shut the book. 

"I don't believe a word of it," Ron said. "Seven thousand pottery soldiers? Get real." 

"I liked it, Hermione. It's a nice bedtime story." Harry yawned. "It almost is bedtime. We'd better get the eggs out of the fire so they'll cool down before we put them to bed on our pillows." 

Ron carried his egg upstairs wrapped in his handkerchief and carefully nestled it into his pillow. As he drifted off to sleep he felt its warmth on the back of his neck and sleepily reached up and gave it a last squeeze. 

* * *

In the tree, Ron dreamed, reached for the warmth behind his neck, and squeezed. 

Harry's yell didn't awaken him. 

* * *

_Note the usual **disclaimer**s apply: characters are J.K. Rowling's and used without permission; you may archive if you tell me, if you do not charge, and if you include "author Caipora (o_caipora@hotmail.com)". _

Note the usual disclaimers apply: characters are J.K. Rowling's and used without permission; you may archive if you tell me, if you do not charge, and if you include "author Caipora (o_caipora@hotmail.com)" 

The seven thousand pottery soldiers are those of Shi Huangdi, which you can read more about at http://www.harcourtschool.com/newsbreak/terra.html. While the soldiers are two thousand years old, don't quote the fable: it is considerably less ancient, as I made it up for the occasion. 

**Content warning:** The last chapter is "NC17" or "R". Prior chapters may feature non-sexual nudity. There is potentially offensive material in earlier chapters; however if you are too young for it you won't understand it. If you haven't been offended by now, you are younger or more innocent than you think. 

This is chapter 5 of 8; the others will be posted as they are revised. 


	6. To the Hills

  
Part 6/8 - **To the Hills **

Last night Hermione had dreamed of a perfect afternoon. Tonight she lay awake thinking of how badly the afternoon had ended, with the three of them stranded in the hollow of a tree in the Forbidden Forest. 

She listened to the rain pouring steadily down on the leaves in the forest outside. An occasional clap of thunder would bring a howl from the red-eyed beast that still kept vigil at the foot of the tree. Ron and Harry shifted in their sleep, each small movement amplified by the dry foliage of abandoned nests crackling beneath them. 

It had been a beautiful dream, and for a month they had all worked to realize it. A weekend away from the school, away from adults, away from supervision, studies, and responsibility. Just her, Ron and Harry, sitting around a campfire under the stars, and then going off to the tent . . . 

Where had it all gone wrong? Ron blamed her for the enchanted perfume - Ron, who had magicked the butterbeer! Her golem spells had gone so well! She thought back. The day had really started so well. 

* * *

After breakfast they had met in the kitchens. Leaving Hogwarts through the service entrance had been Harry's plan. They'd made no secret of their picnic, but their baggage was enough to raise questions. House elves are neither very curious nor very bright, and would think nothing of Ron's pack laden with tent and tools, or the bottles of butterbeer that Harry had brought down from the dorm. 

Indeed, only a spell could have shown that the still sealed bottles had been magically fortified with the principal ingredient of the potions adults drank. Ron had been quite proud of the magic, even though they'd only been able to achieve fifty percent purity, or what the testing spell called "one hundred proof". 

There was no need to ask the elves for enough food for lunch and dinner. They had already packed a picnic basket full to overflowing when Hermione arrived with her bag of magical ingredients and implements. 

She knew that neither boys nor house elves know how to pack a picnic basket properly. She sent Ron and Harry to wait outside while she went through the basket with Dobby. 

Finally she called in Harry to take charge of the basket and thanked the house elves profusely. . Harry hefted it with a certain strain, and the three set out. 

In their shirt pockets they carried the clay eggs they had made on their first visit to the meadow two weeks before. Since then the eggs had been absorbing their patterns of thought and were now attuned to them. From the eggs they could hatch golems that they could sense and control from afar. 

Hagrid had shown them the long route to the high meadow on that first trip, skirting the Forbidden Forest. When they reached the Forest Harry called a break and they set down their bundles. 

"Boy, this basket is heavy," said Harry, "and from here on it's all uphill! If we just cut through the forest we'll shave three kilometers off the trip." 

"The forest isn't really dangerous in the daytime, anyway," Ron added. 

"No way!" Hermione glared at them. "We've planned for a month, and you want to risk it all to save half an hour of walking? You boys!" Harry and Ron exchanged looks but argued no further. 

At the second stop the boys were sweating despite the morning cool. They took off their robes, rolled them up, and tied them to their burdens. 

As they continued Hermione looked at the boys hiking ahead of her. In shirts and trousers they looked like ordinary English schoolboys. Hermione had grown so used to castles and robes, brooms and spells, that the sight jolted her. 

She thought back to the years before she received the letter summoning her to Hogwarts, when she had had ordinary Muggle ambitions. She had wanted to be a doctor when she grew up. That seemed like another world, now. 

But the two boys ahead, without their robes, looked not too different from the boys in her old neighborhood, the ones she had always played doctor with. She shook her head to remove the thought, and quickened her pace to join them. 

It was well before noon when they reached the meadow. Harry set down the basket with a sigh of relief. Ron dropped the pack, undid the tent and picked up the shovel. 

"Golems, here we come!" 

"Just a minute, Ron Weasley. We have to set up the tent and prepare a place for the campfire." 

"Why don't we make the golems first and have them do all that for us?" 

"Because it will take hours to make them, and I am not going to try complicated spells on an empty stomach. So let's get the camp set up and have our picnic, and then we'll make the golems." 

The boys grumbled but complied . When Hermione found a better location for the tent, they complained that it was already halfway set up. Boys just didn't understand some things. 

Finally it was time for lunch. Again, the boys wanted to hurry instead of laying things out properly. 

"We'll have to unpack the basket completely to get the picnic blanket from the bottom. " 

"Just do as Hermione asks, Ron. Please." Harry shot Ron a glance. Hermione had a way of intentionally slowing down when she didn't get her way. 

Ron unpacked. When he got to the bottom he let out a howl. "There are only four bottles of butterbeer here!" 

"Well, it didn't fit, Ron. I needed space for the blanket, and the silverware, the dishes, the glasses, and the water pitcher." 

Harry looked at her in disbelief. "You left the butterbeer behind, so I could carry plates and forks uphill for an hour?" 

"Calm down, Ron! You too, Harry! I told Dobby to put the bottles back under Ron's bed. So if we drink all four bottles tonight we can have the golems fetch the rest when they come back here tomorrow morning." She handed the pitcher to Harry, who took it as if it were a dead rat. "Harry, could you fill up the pitcher at the stream? The water's pure here, and we shouldn't drink the butterbeer until we've finished the golem spells. " 

Dobby had packed an excellent lunch. It wasn't possible to enjoy it fully, as the boys were so impatient to get started on the golems. 

Hermione patted her lips with a napkin. "Well, that was good. Now let's get started. We'll need to dig clay." 

"How much?" Ron asked. 

"Our weight or a little more. The spell just won't use any leftover. We'll have to make an approximate doll on the grass, then cast the spell." 

Ron let the way along the stream bank, followed by Harry and Hermione carrying her bag of magical tools, until they came to the hole where the boys had dug the clay for the eggs two weeks before. Harry and Hermione sat on a rock that had warmed with the sun, while Ron started to dig. After only a few shovels of clay, he stepped back. 

"I've already got my shoes half covered with mud, and I didn't bring a change of clothes. This isn't going to work." 

"I'll dig for a bit, Ron. Hang on a sec." Hermione turned to see Harry removing his shoes. He tucked his socks into them, then stood up. Hermione was surprised to see him unbuttoning his shirt, and her gaze stayed on his chest when he dropped the shirt on the rock. Then Harry's hands went to his belt buckle. Hermione watched as he unbuckled the belt, unbuttoned and unzipped his trousers. 

Harry lowered his trousers with both hands, and took out first the left leg, then the right, and stood on the rock in boxer shorts. 

"Hey Hermione, you're mouth's open!" said Ron, and she realized that it was and shun it hastily and looked away from Harry. "What's the matter? Harry's swim suit shows more than that." Hermione blushed. She kept her eyes on Ron, but her mind was on Harry's red plaid underwear. 

Harry jumped from the rock and grabbed the shovel from Ron. "You can do the next one." Unconcerned with neatness, he shoveled clay onto the grass, and the pile rose quickly as mud spattered his legs. Hermione watched him, then realized that she was staring again. She turned to the magic bag and set out what she needed for the first spell, glancing at Harry from time to time. 

"Enough," she said finally, "Ron, we're doing yours first. Give me your egg." 

Ron handed over the clay egg reluctantly. He'd carried it for two weeks now. The spell had needed a week to attune the clay to him, but he'd grown fond of it. Hermione put it in a pestle and raised a heavy mortar. 

"Hey! You're not going to break it, are you?" 

"We need to mix it with the rest of the clay, Ron," Hermione answered. As she brought the mortar down Ron braced himself, but when the egg shattered he felt nothing. The lightly baked egg was quickly ground into powder. "Now it's got to be mixed in. There's no magic in that, only muscle. Harry, would you?" She smiled. 

Ron seemed to resent the reference to "muscle", Hermione noticed. While Harry stirred the powered egg into the mass of clay Ron came over to the rock where Hermione sat and also stripped to his undershorts. A faded purple paisley, she noticed, a hand-me-down from his brothers. Though faded, the cloth looked as if it had the softness acquired only through countless washings. She wanted to reach out and run her hand over the fabric, but restrained herself. 

"That'll do, Harry. Ron, you lie down on the grass over to the side, and Harry and I will make the doll." Hermione took off her shoes and socks, and saw that both boys were gazing at her raptly. She stood up and starting at the collar slowly unbuttoned her shirt, pretending to fumble to stretch out the process. She had bought new underthings for this trip. Her bra was white cotton as always, but unlike her usual severe, practical models it had a bit of lace. 

She looked at Harry and Ron. They were frozen where they stood. She looked down at her waist, and unfastened her skirt. She carefully folded it and placed it atop the rest of the clothes. 

She looked at the boys. Their eyes were riveted to her panties, and somehow Hermione didn't think they were noticing how they matched her bra. 

"Ron, like you said, this covers more than my bikini does. Stop staring and we'll get to work. You're the model, Ron. Lie down on the grass beside the clay. Over there." 

Ron lay down, and Hermione noticed how rather than laying spread-eagled he lay like a mummy, feet together and arms by his side with his hands cupped over his crotch. She had an impulse to tell him to spread his arms and legs, but really this way the doll would be easier to make. 

She directed Harry to shovel the mound of clay into an approximate form, and then the two of them set to work with their hands. In about twenty minutes they were covered with mud to their elbows, but they had a rough model. 

Hermione stood up and examined it. If Ron's looked like a mummy, the mound look like the mummy's case. It was comfortably larger in every dimension than the boy laying on the grass beside it. 

"That looks as much like Ron as a mud pie looks like a pie," said Harry. 

"If a witch could turn the Gingerbread Boy into a boy, there's no reason we can't turn this clay into a golem," said Hermione. 

"Stand up, Ron. Stand back, both of you. Here goes." She picked up the red book, ran over the spells again. Candles had to be set around the golem, powders poured into a brazier. Finally all was ready. She raised her wand. 

The incantation was only four verses. The pile of mud suddenly quivered like gelatin when its plate is shaken. The form altered, seemed more firm, and in places mud slid and pink flesh was visible. 

Ron cried out, swayed, and sat down. 

"Ron! Are you all right?" Harry was at his side, arm around his shoulders. 

"I'm . . .I'm all right, but I feel . . . It's like double vision. Like I'm sitting here, I can feel your arm. But I also feel that I'm laying on my back covered with cold mud." 

Hermione was at his side now, too. "Ron, you're feeling the connection to the golem. Just sit for a minute. Now, I want you to close your eyes and concentrate on the golem. Tell it to stand up." 

Harry and Hermione turned to look at the golem. The arms lifted. Lifted! The whole doll sat up. A hand went to the head and came away with a handful of mud, then another. Eyes opened in the face, brown eyes that looked just like Ron's. Now the golem moved more quickly, till its motions seemed those of Ron. The golem rose to its feet. 

Harry laughed. "Hermione, it may move, but it looks like a mud doll! We can't fool anyone with that!" 

Ron's eyes flew open. "That's not me!" 

"Don't be silly. Can't you see it just needs a bath?" 

"Well, I could walk it into the stream . . ." 

"Not running water, Ron! Harry, run back to the tent and get the pitcher. We'll give it a bath on the bank." He left at a run. 

"Ron, try moving it." 

"How?" 

"Anything instinctive, or anything you did while carrying the egg, you just need to tell it. Tell it to walk over to that tree." 

"Well, okay." The golem turned and walked to the tree. The walk was Ron's. Even covered in mud Hermione wouldn't have mistaken it for anyone else. Soon Ron had it doing jumping jacks. Chunks of mud flew from its arms and legs, and it looked like a very dirty boy instead of an animated mud doll. 

Harry arrived with the pitcher and stopped abruptly at the sight of the jumping golem, which stopped and bowed to him. 

Hermione laughed. "Give me the pitcher, Harry. Ron, walk the golem over by the stream." 

She filled the pitcher and poured it over the golem's head while scrubbing with her left hand. Red hair shone through the muck. 

"Ron, now try to walk around while leaving the golem standing here." The golem started to take a step, then settled back as Ron walked towards it. 

Hermione resumed washing. After a few more pitchers of water Ron's head was visible atop the golem's muddy torso. 

Hermione continued with the chest. The flesh felt warm under her hands. warm and resilient like a real body. _Of course_, she thought, _you know what wizards make golems for._ The nipples grew hard as her palm passed over them. Another pitcher and she was washing the ribs. Her little finger cleared mud from the navel. 

She filled the pitcher again, poured it on the thick mud, already partly dissolved by the water dripping from above. 

"Ron! I wondered if your hair would be red at both ends!" She turned to him and grinned. 

"Here! I can finish that!" Ron took the pitcher from her and refilled it. He washed one arm, then the other. Then he filled the pitcher again and tossed the entire contents at the golem's lower belly. He reached forward to as if to use his fingers to comb mud from the slight hairs that had grew there. 

He stopped. Hermione wondered what he felt, with Harry and her grinning at him. Of course he knew how to wash himself. But now he was, well, washing himself. Then Ron took the pitcher and handed it to the golem. "Wash". 

He had an expression of concentration. Of course. They used bathtubs or showers at Hogwarts, so the golem couldn't remember how to wash with a pitcher. Ron had to tell it every step. Soon though the golem seemed to get the hang of it and Ron relaxed. He stepped back with Harry and Hermione and watched. 

Ron seemed to have gotten his embarrassment under control. Hermione could see him sneaking glances at her. She kept her face straight so that he couldn't tell how much she was enjoying the show. 

The show was getting better. The golem was now washing its crotch, and was doing a thorough job. _So that reflex works, too_, Hermione noticed. 

Ron noticed too. The golem abruptly stopped and turned around. Ron took the pitcher from it, and washed its back. He washed the mud from his own arms and legs before handing the pitcher back and ordering it to continue. 

Finally the golem was clean. "Ron, walk it and you over by the rock. Let's see how well the spell worked." 

Hermione noticed that he was able to send the golem first, and did not need to move in lockstep with it. Good, the golems could operate independently. 

"Stand beside it, Ron. Harry, help me look for flaws." 

"Well, it needs a haircut too. Is that a flaw?" 

"Harry, we're looking for differences." 

"It's cleaner than Ron usually is." 

"Stop it, Harry." She looked carefully at Ron, then at the golem. She tried to count freckles, but it there were too many. "Show me your fingernails. 

"Lift your left foot. 

"Turn around. 

"Face front. 

"Ron, you're not circumcised?" 

That made him turn red again. "No." 

"Well, looks just fine to me. What do you think, Harry?" 

"We haven't heard the golem talk yet." 

"Good point. Ron, make it say something." 

They'd been studying Shakespeare that week, in one of their non-magical classes. Ron had had to recite a sonnet while wearing the clay egg. He sent a thought to the golem. 

The golem was looking at Hermione as it said, 

" Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?  
Thou art more lovely and more temperate."

For a moment she believed it was really a naked Ron Weasley, reciting a love poem to her. 

The golem stopped. "Sorry." it said. 

"I mean, sorry," said Ron in the same voice. 

Hermione was startled from her reverie. "Well, let's do the other golems then." 

Her spell had worked, and the weekend would go as planned. 

If she could believe the golem was Ron Weasley declaring his love, the golem would fool anyone. 

* * *

_Note the usual **disclaimer**s apply: characters are J.K. Rowling's and used without permission; you may archive if you tell me, if you do not charge, and if you include "author Caipora (o_caipora@hotmail.com)". _

**Content warning:** The last chapter is "NC17" or "R". Prior chapters may have nudity. Eeek. There is potentially offensive material in earlier chapters; however if you are too young for it you won't understand it. If you haven't been offended by now, you are younger or more innocent than you think. 

This is chapter 6 of 8; the others will be posted as they are revised. 


	7. The Perfume is Opened

  
Part 7/8 - **The Perfume is Opened **

Harry Potter had never before awoken in a tree. Or with a naked girl curled up beside him. He'd often woken up dreaming of a girl, of course, while the tree was a completely new experience. So was a hangover, though unlike the girl and the tree, he couldn't recognize it for what it was. 

Sunlight filtered green by the leaves of the Forbidden Forest illuminated the hollow in the ancient tree where they'd taken refuge in the night. The hollow was little more than a meter across. Their nocturnal twisting and tossing had caused them to sink into the powdery remains of old nests that formed the floor of the hollow. Little was visible of Ron but his red hair, but Hermione had her head and one breast above the mulch. Harry looked for a long time at that breast, a powder of crumbled leaves dusting it like cinnamon, moving up and down with her slow breathing. 

Harry tore his gaze away, and thought _What time is it, anyway?_. He gave up. The light was too diffuse to tell if the hole in the bole faced east or west, or if the sun was high or low. _Maybe if I'd been a Boy Scout I could tell by which birds are singing_, he thought. 

He thought of waking the others. There was so much to do. They had to find their way back to the campsite, the golems had to be roused at the castle and instructed to leave before too many people saw them, and someone guessed that they weren't the real Ron, Harry and Hermione. 

There was so much to do. But part of being a leader is knowing where to lead. Waking first had given Harry a few minutes to make plans, rather than argue them out with the others. _Well then, what should we do?_

Nothing came to mind. They'd spend a month planning this trip, and it had taken only a few hours for it to all to fall apart. Who was Harry Potter to figure out how to fix it all before breakfast? 

_Well_, he thought, _I'm Harry Potter, that's who. The trip was my idea. Hermione thought of the golems and cast the spells for them. Ron magicked the butterbeer. I just posed as leader._

Last night things had gone wrong, badly wrong. Harry had led, and they'd woken up alive. Still, they'd gone to bed naked in a hollow tree in a rainstorm, with some red-eyed beast baying at the foot of the tree. 

Had they fled? No, Harry had heard a term for it. Something some general had said. He willed his pounding head to remember it. _'Withdrawing to previously prepared positions.' That was it._ A thousand years and more of forest creatures had prepared this position in the tree, and it was there when they needed it. _Probably it was the best thing we could have done,_ Harry thought, _It worked, and I can't think of anything else we could have tried._

What were their problems? _That silly enchanted perfume of Hermione's_. Harry sniffed. The hollow smelled of autumn leaves and dried herbs, lavender and pine needles. Strange that there wasn't a scent of a thousand years of animal droppings. Or not so strange. _The way my mouth tastes, I must have eaten them all last night._ He sniffed again. The perfume was very faint, almost completely gone. _Well, she **said** the recipe promised 'an unforgettable night'. We'll never forget this one, that's for sure. At least it's finally morning._

If the perfume was gone, that made everything easier. They could do magic again - once they got their wands. Still, they'd survived the night without any magic. They'd done the right thing, maybe the best thing they could have done, by luck or by instinct. _Now_, thought Harry, _we've pushed our luck far enough. I've got to use my head, even if it is pounding like Dudley's drum set._

How to set everything right? Well, when did it all go wrong? _After we made the golems_, Harry decided. Surely no more than eighteen hours before, but it seemed much longer. He thought back. _Just what **had** happened?_

* * *

They made Ron's golem first. Harry excavated the clay and mixed in the ground up remains of the pottery egg that Ron had carried around for a week, letting it absorb the pattern of his thoughts. Harry and Hermione formed the clay into a rough model of Ron, and Hermione cast the spell. The clay doll came to life, and once the excess clay was washed off, showed itself to be a remarkably exact copy of Ron. 

Embarrassingly exact, as the golem was quite unclad. Ron was working in his boxer shorts - making golems is about as neat an activity as making mud pies - and went to get his pants to loan to the golem. 

Harry glanced at Hermione bent over her spellbook and stopped Ron with a hand on his arm. Ron turned to him, puzzled, and Harry raised his eyebrows and jerked his head ever so slightly towards Hermione. After a moment Ron smiled and nodded his understanding and agreement. 

"Hermione, let's do Harry's golem next. Look, I'll set mine to dig." Ron's golem picked up the shovel and rapidly started making a pile of clay like the one from which it had risen. 

"Thanks, Ron." Hermione looked at the golem, the image of Ron, working tirelessly. "Um . . . don't you want to loan it your shorts or something?" 

"Why, Hermione? It's just a golem." 

Harry feigned the same indifference when his golem was up and moving. He washed it down with pitchers of water (running water wreaks havoc with most magic, so a bath in the stream was out) and exercised it naked in the sunny meadow. 

Finally Hermione's doll rose from a third mud pile, and the boys watched intently as the excess mud came off a body just like Hermione's. Their bravado had the desired effect: for her to complain now about the nakedness of an animated mud doll would smack of silly prudery. 

They practiced with the golems all afternoon, until each could push awareness of his golem to the back of his consciousness, and control it only when needed. Their overnight absence from school depended on the golems reliably impersonating them though dinner, a night in the dorm, and an early breakfast. 

At the end of the afternoon they were satisfied. They'd had several hours of practice, and also had had the golems chop up two fallen trees to provide wood for the evening's bonfire. 

"Only one problem," Harry said, "If the idea is for them to pass unnoticed, we probably shouldn't send them back naked. Also, someone may have noticed what clothes we left in, and if after a day in the woods together we all come back dressed differently, there might be talk." 

"So we use a duplication spell and give them a copy of our clothes." 

"No good, Ron, on two accounts," said Hermione. "First, as you know, two spells operating in close proximity can cause unexpected interference. If you put a magic copy of your shorts on your golem, by the time it undressed for bed it might be wearing pink shorts over a purple paisley butt." 

"That might be an improvement," suggested Harry. 

" **AHEM** " Hermione continued, "Secondly, Dumbledore has had entirely too many problems with invisibility cloaks and may have set some alarms around the castle, to warn of visitors wearing enchanted garments." 

"Why no alarms against golems?" Ron asked. 

"Well, he hasn't had any problems with golems, has he?" she said. "Besides, I got the spell out of a book of love charms. A lot of the teachers are unmarried. If they're making golems, Dumbledore just may not want to know." 

"Good point," said Harry, laughing. He understood golems better now that he'd seen Hermione's. "But still, what do the golems wear?" 

"Actually, I think Ron had almost the right idea. We use a duplication spell, all right, but **we** wear the copies and the golems wear the real clothes." 

The boys walked over to the rock where they'd left their clothes in heaps. Ron picked up his wand, then paused. "Hermione? Would you turn around a minute?" 

"What?" 

"I've got to duplicate my shorts, too." 

Soon the boys were dressed in the magically duplicated clothes, and their golems were putting on the originals. 

"Now you boys turn your backs," Hermione ordered. 

The boys did, and Harry noticed Ron mouthing words. He looked more closely. "Use the golem". Harry shut his eyes and tried to see through the golem's. _Yes!_ He could see the rock, and Hermione, waving her wand at a pile of clothes topped by white panties and bra, with just a little lace. Then she was taking clothes from the pile of duplicates and putting them on. 

Harry watched through the golem's eyes until he heard her shout "Ready!" Then he commanded the golem to come and stand by his side. 

"What do we look like, Hermione?" 

"Like children of one of those demented mothers who doesn't realize her twins are too old to be dressed alike. " 

He laughed, "Well, so do you! The Granger Twins!" 

"So you're Harry Potter and Harry Pottery." 

They sent the golems back to Hogwarts. The three had been wearing the clay eggs the last time they'd make the journey, so the golems remembered the path, and just had to be told to follow it. 

They trailed the golems to the camp site. It was eerie to see themselves walking ahead. Other than being strangely silent and disinterested in the scenery, each thought the golems of the other two looked just like them. 

None of the three thought his own golem a very good likeness, but that is a phenomenon experienced by any Muggle child who has ever seen himself on videotape. 

As they watched the golems disappear down the hillside towards Hogwarts, Harry looked at his copy of his watch. "Downhill it's only an hour. We'd better have them wait a bit at the end so that they arrive just in time for dinner." 

"Maybe we should take turns watching them, just in case," said Hermione. 

"Good idea. You get the first leg, down to our last rest stop this morning. Then Ron can take them to the border of the Forbidden Forest, and I'll handle them from there." 

While Hermione sat with her back to a tree, Ron and Harry busied themselves starting the campfire. Now that the golems were made and on their way, casual magic would not interfere with them. Harry set the fire alight with a wave of his wand. A quick warding spell set up an invisible barrier against creatures from the Forest. 

The fire would have to burn down to embers before they could cook dinner. The looked at the flames till Hermione came up. "Your turn, Ron." He settled himself on the ground, leaning against the woodpile, and closed his eyes. 

They could not cook yet, but Hermione opened the picnic basket and got out the campfire food. The food that came out of the basket seemed too wholesome for Dobby to have selected by himself: steaks and sausages and baking potatoes. _Hermione playing house_, Harry thought. Still, she hadn't forgotten a bag of marshmallows. Harry took the bottles of butterbeer down to the stream to cool. 

When he came back Ron was standing. "Where were you? It's your turn already." 

Harry took Ron's position against the woodpile. It was still warm from Ron's body. Harry closed his eyes and concentrated. 

He was looking through the golem's eyes. He stood at the edge of the Forbidden Wood. Crows circled overhead, and far across the fields he could see Hogwarts. The other two golems stood with him. He called to them, "Come on." He walked towards the castle, and they followed. 

_Whoa_, Harry thought, _The **golem** walked, not me._ He concentrated. If he tried, he could hear the crows cawing, feel the evening breeze on the golem's skin. 

How had the trip been so far? _Did my golem really hear Hermione's?_ He thought back. _Nothing_ . He could sense whatever the golem sensed, but its memories were closed to him. 

In the Hogwarts gardens he found a secluded bench, a place the seventh-year boys bragged they took girls after the spring dance. 

A moment later, back at the camp, Harry opened his eyes. 

"All right, it's almost dinner. We're all going to have to tune in to our golems until bedtime." 

"What about dinner for us?" 

"Ron, no one will think it odd if we go to bed early after a day of hiking. In another hour we'll be tucked in there, and we'll eat here. And we'll open your butterbeer." 

The other two sat down beside Harry against the woodpile. With the fire to keep them warm, and the magical wards to keep away the creatures of the forest, they would be fine here. 

"Where are we, Harry?" 

"That little arbor with the stone bench, just down from the main gate." 

"Right, I know the place you mean." 

"Who took you there, Hermione? I know it wasn't Ron or I." Then Harry closed his eyes and followed the link to the golem. The other two were still beside him, but now they were all sitting on the stone bench. 

Dinner was odd. They sat in the Great Hall without really being there. They picked a corner of the table crowded with younger students. When Neville and Seamus appeared in the hall, Harry had only to make his golem gesture at the chairs filled with first year students and shrug. 

Few of the professors were there, and none came by their corner of the table. The only close call came when Draco Malfoy walked by on his way to the Slytherin table. "Baby sitting tonight, Potter?" 

Harry sat silently. A crunching noise came from Ron's place, then a clatter as his knife dropped on the table. All eyes went to it. Ron's golem had crushed the handle. 

Draco had his mouth open for another jibe. He stared, whitened, and walked away without another word. 

The first year students stared too. Ron's golem turned to the closest. "Want to see another trick? I can take a coin out of your ear." While the younger children watched the sleight of hand, Hermione dropped her napkin over the crushed knife, then palmed it. 

_What a night for a fight_, Harry thought, _Too bad there's no way the golems would escape being detected by one of the professors. Darn._

They spent only ten minutes in the common room, ostentatiously stretching and yawning. Though the window by the fireplace they could see the hills beyond the Forbidden Forest. For a month they had sat here every night, thinking of the night they would spend off there in the hills. Now they were there - and here, too. 

Harry walked his golem upstairs beside Ron's. They put on their pajamas. Their trip to the bathroom was brief; as their toothbrushes were in the tent off in the hills, and brushing teeth that would turn back to clay the next day was a pointless exercise anyway. 

Ron's golem turned to Harry's. "Think they can go to bed by themselves?" 

"Sure. Let's get back to the campfire. I'm hungry." 

Ron and Harry opened their eyes to see Hermione by the fire, putting the steaks on the grill. The foil-wrapped potatoes were already resting in the embers. "There you are. I was wondering what you two were up to. Another ten minutes and we'll have dinner." 

"Ron, why don't you open those bottles of butterbeer?" 

Ron was soon back from the stream with a bottle of magicked butterbeer in each hand. "You know, I could hear lots of animals across the stream. Must be from the Forbidden Forest." 

The three looked around. On the other side of the clearing, where wind from the forest carried the smell of roasting meat, the night was full of eyes. 

Ron filled a tumbler for each of them. . 

"Ignore them. They can't get through the warding spell." Harry raised his tumbler. "Here's to our trip." 

They clinked their glasses, and each took a gulp. 

Harry thought he had swallowed liquid fire. His eyes watered and he started to choke, but managed to only cough. Still, once the butterbeer got down, it seemed to warm his stomach. He sipped at his cup, more cautiously this time. 

"It tastes like it's burning, Ron!" said Hermione. 

"That's probably because it's only fifty percent pure, what the measuring spell called "hundred proof". If we could make it pure maybe it wouldn't have that taste." 

In a few minutes the tumblers were empty and Ron refilled them. Hermione got up and took the steaks off the grill, but stumbled and almost dropped them. 

The steaks were served out and the potatoes retrieved with a few burnt fingers. They were all ravenous. They devoured the steaks, washing them down with butterbeer. 

It was a splendid evening. The moon seemed brighter than they had ever seen, the clouds growing steadily thicker merely added to the beauty of the night. Jokes were funnier. The evening air had seemed cool, but with a bit more butterbeer they felt it not at all. 

They had pulled off a major magical stunt, one that matched any student prank they had heard of. They were on a mountain in spring, with the sky above them and the breeze in their hair. Or it may have been only that they were young and free of supervision. And it might have been all that, and a bottle of rather potent butterbeer. It was a splendid evening. 

Hermione rose and went to her bag of magical apparatus. After some fumbling she pulled out a small oval glass flask. Harry saw her apply a few drops to her fingers. She patted her fingers behind her ears and then, raising her chin, ran her fingers in a long stroke down her neck. She dropped the bottle into her shirt pocket. 

Puzzled, he watched her come back to the fire, weaving slightly. "What's that, Hermione?" 

"Just .. . just a perfume that I made from a recipe in the spell book." 

"Perfume? Let me smell it." 

Harry got up. For some reason that was difficult. Ron, he noticed, was getting up too, sitting down abruptly once in the process. They were on their feet as she reached the fire. 

Harry breathed in the perfume. His head spun, his stomach lurched. For a moment Hermione looked like a wood nymph. 

The oval bottle dropped through Hermione's pocket. It fell to the ground and shattered on a rock, spattering the three with perfume. The smell was overpowering. 

"What? Look! Our clothes! They're dissolving! It's acid!" 

Harry could see his trousers shredding as if they were lint, patches falling off and drifting toward the ground, dissolving into nothing with a faint sparkle. "It's not acid, Ron. Something's undoing the magic in the clothes." He grabbed his wand, his hand tearing his pocket off in the process. _A preservation spell. What's a preservation spell?_ His head was spinning. 

Harry would have liked to think that despite the confusion and the butterbeer, he remembered to check the wards. The beasts of the forest had checked more quickly than he, though. A roar nearby made them all look up. 

Well, one spell came to mind. "Lumos!" Harry shouted. Nothing happened. "Ron! Hermione!" 

"Lumos!" 

"Lumos!" 

All the eyes were closer. The three looked at each other. The other two looked to Harry. His glasses dissolved in a burst of sparkles. 

"Forget the magic. Drop the wands. Run for the stream! Now!" 

They ran for the stream, away from the nearest of the beasts, who stopped to worry the remains of their dinner and the rest of their provisions. 

They wove and stumbled unaccountably. Their shoes had torn off and disintegrated in the first few paces. They came to the stream. 

"Hold hands," Harry said. "It's pitch black in the Forest, and we can't get separated." 

"Run into the Forbidden Forest? Are you crazy, Harry?" 

"There are more than enough creatures here to eat us. The running water will slow some of them." 

"Where will we go?" 

"Away. They're coming. Now run!" 

* * *

_Note the usual **disclaimer**s apply: characters are J.K. Rowling's and used without permission; you may archive if you tell me, if you do not charge, and if you include "author Caipora (o_caipora@hotmail.com)". _

**Content warning:** The last chapter is "NC17" or "R". Prior chapters may have nudity. Eeek. There is potentially offensive material in earlier chapters; however if you are too young for it you won't understand it. If you haven't been offended by now, you are younger or more innocent than you think. 

This is chapter 7 of 8; the last (smutty, slashy, improper) chapter will be posted a in a day or two when I finish cleaning it up for a general audience. 


	8. The Rest of the Golems

  
Part 8 and LAST/8 - **The Rest of the Golems **

_**Warning**: This chapter has more **mature content** than previous chapters.  
If you're under 17, you should not be reading this._

"It's crazy to run into the Forbidden Forest at night!" 

"Tell that to those things that are chasing us, Ron!" 

They had been running for at least ten minutes. Harry hadn't thought they'd last this long. Barefoot, in the nearly pitch black shadow of the trees, not knowing the paths, woozy from the magicked butterbeer - how had they survived? 

He had no breath to spare for talk. They had fled at first in panic. Now they were running in despair and exhaustion. Harry's head was pounding and his stomach clenching with nausea. The baying of the beasts of the forest behind them filled his ears, but he had to think. _How did we come this far? How can we keep going? How can we escape? _

This part of the forest was ancient. At night it was too dark for them to see their way, but the dimness of the daylight here let no bushes grow. Underbrush did not block them, branches did not lash their bare shins. Decades or centuries of fallen leaves cushioned their bare feet. 

The beasts weren't impeded by underbrush either, though. _Why haven't they caught us? Okay, the stream helped. Running water,_ Harry thought, _Magical creatures have to go around it. So we had a head start. But there's got to be something more._

''Hermione, Ron. Run into the wind." 

"Why?" Ron gasped. 

"Perfume. Slows down magic beasts." 

_Hermione's darn enchanted perfume_. It had cancelled the wards that defended their campsite from the beasts and made their wands useless. It had even dissolved their clothes, woven by magic and mere copies of their real garments, which their golems had worn back to the castle. 

Nearly all the beasts of the Forbidden Forest had magic, great or small. A little rodent might have some not quite natural talent that hid it from predators, while a dragon or a basilisk would cease to exist without magic. 

Harry panted. To run into the wind they now were running uphill. It slowed them, but even so the pursuit sounded farther behind. The perfume must confuse any animals that tracked them by magic, while keeping the deadlier creatures from approaching them at all. 

There was enough perfume at least. The three of them had been spattered with the stuff when the flask dissolved a hole in Hermione's pocket and smashed on a rock. 

They might make it through this. 

"Harry. I. Can't. Run. Much. Farther". 

"Hermione. Keep on till the top of the hill. Just keep going." _Well, that gives me a few minutes to think._

They couldn't keep running. The trees were too big to climb. Harry had made them drop the wands in camp. He had known the wands were less the useless: if they'd had them, they would have kept trying wands that didn't work instead of looking for something that did. _But what would work?_

The ground leveled. Hermione was breathing in gasping sobs. "Ron! Hermione! Look for branches on the ground that we can use as clubs!" 

They searched for thirty seconds, a minute. The sound of the chase grew closer. The ground held only the same soft mulch as elsewhere. 

"Harry! Hermione! Come over here!" 

Ron had stumbled into . . .was it a tree? Harry tried to put his arms around it, and could only feel the slightest curve. But it had to be a tree. That was bark. It had the warmth of bark, the deep furrows. 

"I think we can climb it, Harry." 

"Let's try it. Let's make a stirrup for Hermione. Put your foot here. Now the other on my shoulder. Ron's shoulder. Can you get a grip?" 

"I think so. There are finger- and toe-holds." 

"Climb, as fast as you can. Go, Hermione, go!" 

"Now you next, Ron." 

"Harry, I think . . ." 

"Ron, don't argue. Climb!" He did. Harry picked a spot a little to the right. He forced his fingers deep into the crevices, grasped, and pulled himself up. 

Harry didn't know how high they were when the pack of beasts reached the tree. The perfume kept some at a distance. When less magical creatures tried to hurl themselves up the trunk . . . However high the wizards were, it was high enough. 

"Harry, I've found a branch." Hermione's voice came from several meters above. 

"Can you keep going? Ron and I are behind you." Harry could hear Ron climbing, keeping pace with him in the darkness to his side. "We should all be a bit higher, too. Just in case, Hermione." 

"I'll try." They kept climbing. "There's another branch, just above. But I can't go any farther. I'm so tired. I feel so sick." 

"Stay there, Hermione. Just hang on." Harry kept climbing. Finally he reached up and found a bough. 

"I'm on the first limb Hermione found." Ron's voice came from the dark almost beside Harry. 

"Stay there, Ron. I've got a limb too, we've all got somewhere to rest, now." 

Finally Harry could pause. He had straddled the branch, chest to the tree, and with his fingers firmly wedged into crevices, he hugged the trunk. The adrenaline rush passed. Harry started to shake. He felt weak. He'd climbed a tree in the dark, before that run for fifteen minutes from a baying pack of Forbidden Forest beasts. Before that he'd stuffed himself with steak and downed two tumblers - or was it more? - of that enchanted butterbeer. 

Harry's stomach churned again, then jumped. He managed to turn his head before he lost his dinner. 

The howl of a beast below stopped in a yelp. 

Harry could hear retching from Ron and Hermione, too. His stomach convulsed again and his lunch followed his dinner downwards. 

"Hermione! I'm right under you!" Poor Ron. 

In a few minutes Harry's stomach had settled somewhat. He was feeling drained and dizzy, but surely the worst was past. The beasts that had howled below now mostly growled. Perhaps they would start to fight among themselves. 

For a moment the growling was drowned out by a snarl from deeper in the forest, from the other side of the hill. The growling below stopped, and there was a sound of padding feet. Another snarl, closer now, raised the hairs on Harry's neck. There was a heavy silence beneath the tree. 

Harry looked down. His eyes had adjusted to the dark, but he could sense motion but no more in the blackness below where only a little moonlight filtered through the leaves. 

Another snarl beneath the tree. A challenging howl. Blows, screams, a yowl that stopped suddenly. Tearing and swallowing, repeated for a long time. Then a sound Harry took a moment to place. Crunching bones. He looked down again. In the dim moonlight, two red eyes looked up. 

* * *

Harry opened his eyes. Well, now it was morning and sunny. Everything seemed easier, all problems seemed smaller. Thinking back on the sounds the red-eyed creature made, he knew what it reminded him of: Dudley with a roast chicken. 

Well, the creature wasn't under the tree now, and its lair must be the other direction from the campsite. They wouldn't walk into it. If they didn't rouse it with noise, and the wind didn't carry their scent to it, they could walk back to camp. If it did come after them they'd have a running head start, and whatever it was, once they got to their wands they'd show it a surprise or two. 

_We'll be fine,_ Harry decided. _It's no more dangerous than a fifteen minute walk in the Forbidden Forest without wands. Fifth-year students do it as a dare._ He could be calm and brave. 

The difficulty would be getting the golems out of Hogwarts unsuspected. Well, there was no set time for breakfast on Sunday at Hogwarts. Students straggled in and out in small clumps. It was never crowded, and no one would notice that Ron, Harry, and Hermione were absent or late. It could be a lot worse. 

Harry's stomach rumbled. They'd have to get the golems to visit Dobby and bring another basket. The beasts must have eaten whatever was at the campsite. 

So how were the golems? He'd have to tune in. If the perfume had broken the connection instead of merely blocking it, they were sunk. Harry looked around the hollow. Ron and Hermione still hadn't stirred. 

He leaned back and closed his eyes, and thought of the golem. 

The golem's eyes were closed. Instead of opening them, Harry concentrated on hearing. 

A rhythmic squeaking sound, to the left. He would have thought a bed swaying, but there was no bed to the left of his. Odd. 

Smell? He linked it. Sweat. Well, the golem had walked back from the hills, and hadn't showered. Taste? Saltiness. What was it, blood? Had he bitten his tongue? No, golems didn't really have blood. What, then? He couldn't place it. 

Harry concentrated on touch. The golem felt like it was floating on clouds. Harry felt a warmth, a gentle pressure sliding up and down. He'd never felt anything like it. 

Harry opened his eyes - no, the golem's eyes. He was looking up at the canopy of a four-poster. But it wasn't his bed. He'd woken to the sight of his canopy since he started at Hogwarts, and knew every seam and moth-hole. Even without his glasses he could tell this wasn't his bed. And what was he feeling? 

He dropped his gaze. That his chest was bare of pajamas would ordinarily have given him a start. But that was trivial now, for he saw the source of that amazing sensation - and a head of flaming red hair. 

Harry was back in the tree, trembling. _What did I see? What have the golems been up to?_ He looked about for a moment. Hermione and Ron hadn't moved. Harry willed himself back into the golem, though this time he started with touch. 

The sensation was stronger now. Harry thought he should stop the golems, but - whatever they were doing they'd been doing all night. What harm in waiting . . . a . . . few . . . more . . . minutes . . . 

Something was about to happen. He didn't know what, but he could feel it. 

"Harry! Harry!" He was being shaken. 

"Hermione! Let go. I'm with the golems! Wait a sec. Be right back." 

"Harry!" Her voice faded as his mind sought the golem. 

Whatever it was, it had happened while Hermione called him away. The golem felt drained and happy, but somehow the feeling was anticlimactic. He looked at the head of red hair, and had a strange impulse to run his fingers through it. 

The head lifted, the eyes opened. The mouth seemed to be trying to speak, spat, and said "Harry?" Then the eyes looked down. "Harry?!" 

_Oh no,_ Harry thought, _Hermione's wakened Ron._

Ron's golem lifted itself to elbows then hands. It slid out of the four-poster. Harry willed his golem to follow. 

Ron's golem turned to Harry's. "Harry. What?" 

_What, really?_ thought Harry. The squeaking he had heard continued, coming from Seamus' bed. _Everything's so strange_. He needed something familiar to focus on. He looked at his own four-poster. It looked odd, the mattress sagging below the frame. _Broken bed slats?_ thought Harry, _How?_

Ron's golem spat into its hand. "I want to brush my teeth." It walked towards the bathroom. "My bum hurts." It paused. "I **REALLY** want to brush my teeth." 

"Ron, the toothbrushes aren't here." 

It looked just like Ron, and looked like it was about to cry. Then it said "Butterbeer," and dropped to its hands and knees and stuck its head under Ron's bed. 

Harry commanded his golem not to move. He was just in time. 

The golem reappeared with one of the bottles of butterbeer that had been left. It opened the bottle with golem strength, and poured a mouthful directly from the bottle. It gargled, went to the window, and spat. 

Seamus' bed stopped swaying, and his head popped from between the curtains, followed by Neville's. "Hey, you two are speaking again! Wow, I bet you didn't sleep a wink. We were so amazed when we came in and saw what you guys were trying. But, like, it's way cool." 

Harry opened the golem's mouth to respond, and stopped. What was there to say? As he paused, the golem's tongue sensed something in its teeth. Automatically its hand reached up, thumb and forefinger found the irritant, pulled it out, and held it up to the light. 

Harry saw a very red, very curly hair. 

Harry made his golem turn to Ron's and extend a hand. "Gimme." He too gargled with a mouthful of the butterbeer. He handed the bottle to Seamus. "You'll like this, too. Now don't bug us." 

"No problem, we got plenty to do." The heads and the bottle disappeared behind the curtains of Seamus's four-poster. 

"What now?" Ron's golem asked Harry's. 

"We get dressed. I'll jump back and tell Hermione to meet us for breakfast. Then we get Dobby to pack us a picnic, and go to the hills as planned." 

Harry was reluctant to leave the golem even for an instant. Its behavior was too unpredictable - and unaccountable. He willed the transition. 

He saw the tree. "Hermione. Meet us in the Great Hall in ten minutes." 

"What happened, Harry? Tell me!" 

"It's okay, Hermione, but I can't leave the golem now. Later. Bye." 

He was back in Gryffindor Tower. The arms of Ron's golem were around him. He disentangled. "You caught me, Ron? Thanks." 

Ron's expression was unreadable. "Right, Harry, I caught you. Now we'd better hurry. " 

Hermione was still irritated at breakfast. "What happened when you woke up, Harry? Why were you so strange?" 

He looked around the Hall. The tables were sparsely populated, but one could never tell what spells might be in use, or who might appear. 

"I don't want to talk here, and I don't want to dawdle. Tell you later." 

Hermione was unappeased. She speared a pancake and her fork broke the plate in two. She looked around; but amidst the clatter of the Hall no one had noticed. "I think you two are putting something over on me. Otherwise, what's with the silly grins?" 

Ron's golem seemed to choke on its orange juice. 

Dobby packed a second picnic basket with no questions, though a few curious glances. Hermione supervised, and giving orders seemed to put her in better spirits. 

Finally the trio were at the arbor in the gardens. They had left Hogwarts undetected. 

"Harry, tell me. What happened this morning?" 

"Wait till we're off the grounds, Hermione." 

The reached the corner of the wood, where Harry had through golem's ears heard the crows at sunset. He motioned for them to pause. 

"Hermione, I want you to check back at the tree. See that we're okay, and look through the hole in the bole and see if there are any animals at the base. Watch for a couple of minutes just to be sure something's not pacing around." 

When her golem swayed and stood still, Harry had his golem turn to Ron's. "Just go along with what I tell her." 

"What about Seamus and Neville?" 

"Once they calm down, they'll agree to a secrecy spell so that none of us ever talks to anyone else about last night in the dorm. Don't worry. Now quiet." 

They waited, and Hermione's golem spoke. "All okay, and all clear." It looked at Harry's golem. "Now spill it. What happened?" 

"I guess I was, well, caught in the golem's dreams. It was really strange. Sorry I didn't tell you earlier. I didn't mean to seem mysterious." 

"You were so strange in the tree, breathing fast and bucking. I thought you were having some sort of a fit, Harry. So I woke you and you disappeared again. I was so worried!" 

"Sorry, Hermione, but we had so many real problems. What was going on in my head just didn't seem too important. I was just really weirded out, that's all." 

He looked at Ron. "Now, here's the plan. We'll order the golems to take the path directly to the camp, and to neither pause nor leave the path. They can do that, and they won't get into mischief with exact orders. Once they're walking, we'll go back to the tree, climb down, and get back to the camp before the golems." 

"Why don't we just have the golems bring our wands to the tree?" 

"Hermione, the forest is safe - well, mostly safe - in daylight. If we send the golems they have to find a path around the running water, then find their way through the woods. Once they find us, yes we've got wands, but we'll each have to guide ourselves and a golem back. If we were attacked we'd have a hard time walking and fighting at the same time." 

"Couldn't we leave the golems at the tree?" Ron asked. 

Hermione answered. "We have to deactivate them and dis-attune the clay. Otherwise anyone finding a bit could make a golems of us - or voodoo dolls. There's a part of the spell, I think it goes 'clay you were, and to your clay return' that maybe means that to really undo them we have to put them back in the same pit." 

She shook her head. "Anyway, I don't care to go casting spells in the Forbidden Forest, never knowing when something may turn up looking to eat me." 

Harry said, "Agreed, then? Now, tell your golems to march to the camp, without stopping, without leaving the trail. Ron, Hermione? Three, two, one, now!" 

The three were back in the tree. Harry sat up and stretched. 

The powdery leaves that formed the floor of the hollow had stuck to their damp bodies the night before, leaving them looking as if they had been dipped in flour or brown sugar, or like monkeys with very short fur. Harry started to brush at it when Ron's waving arms distracted him. 

"Hey look! Camouflage!" 

Harry laughed. "You may be right. With a little luck nothing will see us." He stuck his head out of the hole. Even without his glasses, he could see that it was farther down than he had thought. The darkness had hidden that on the way up. 

"Still no animals. I'll go first, then Ron. We'll go to that second branch and wait for you, Hermione. That way if you fall we can catch you. But don't fall, okay?" 

Without waiting for arguments, he swung his legs out of the hole, grasped the rim with his hands, and lowered himself. Searching with his toes he moved his feet outwards till he found a firm grip. One hand moved from rim to bark, and he was on his way down. 

When Harry reached the first branch, he looked up and saw Ron and Hermione looking down. "Now for you, Ron." 

"It's so far down, Harry!" 

"Don't look down, Ron. Look up or look at the bark in front of you. Come on, you climbed up without being able to see anything at all, and it was raining then, too." 

Ron's head disappeared, and his feet stuck out and swung down. Harry watched his progress anxiously. Every now and then he would call out a hold. "Left foot just a little outward and down." Soon Ron was straddling the branch, sandwiched between Harry and the tree. 

Harry felt Ron's warm back against his chest, with the slight grit of the layers of leaves between. He thought of the golems, and started calculating the cubes of prime numbers. 

"Ron, same thing we did last night. Find a grip on the left, I'll find one on the right, arms around each other and lean outwards." Harry's hand was over Ron's rib cage, and he could feel Ron's heart. It was beating quickly. "All right, Hermione, we're ready just in case. Come on down!" 

Harry looked up. So did Ron. Hermione was coming down the tree, no more slowly than the boys had. Her feet moved with confidence, her toes finding grips easily. He left foot moved outward, then her right, seeking purchase, moved outward too. Her left hand found a grip half a meter farther down, and her body lowered, her knees flexing. 

Ron's heart was pounding under Harry's hand, which was growing slick with sweat. "Don't look up, Ron. Look down or look at the bark." 

Harry and Ron edged backwards, and Hermione settled onto the branch in front of them. 

"All right, We'll do the same thing to the next branch. Here goes." Harry swung to the trunk and started down. The distance was smaller, but he was tired when he reached the branch. 

"Come on, Ron." Ron, too, was breathing heavily when he reached the branch. So was Hermione. "Let's rest a bit. Say, are you guys really tired?" 

"Yeah, Harry." 

"Me, too." 

"I wonder how come?" 

Hermione spoke. "The golem spell. The longer it's on, the weaker it makes us. That's why it's only good for a day or two. After that it gets dangerous." 

Harry looked down. "Well, a fall from here might not even break a leg. Let's give it a few minutes, though. We should all go down side by side, so that no one is kept waiting on the ground. I'm not sure I could climb up again, even if that red-eyed thing came back and brought its family." 

"Me neither. I hope we don't have to run to the camp. I feel more like crawling. " 

Ten minutes later they climbed down the last leg, Ron to the left, Harry to the right, and Hermione straight down from the branch. Their bare feet landed softly on the loam. 

Hermione turned to the tree and gave it a hug and planted a kiss on its rough bark. She stood back and smiled, and Ron and finally Harry repeated the gesture. Without its shelter, what would have become of them? 

The layers of decaying leaves, damp from the rain, held tracks. In one direction enormous claws had ripped deep into the forest floor. In the other direction the path the three had taken from the camp was clearly visible. Their prints were obscured, but the many tracks of their pursuers required no woodcraft to follow. 

Harry raised a finger to his lips and gestured. Despite their tiredness, they moved quickly. Their bare feet were quiet on the leaves, and though the sunlight was dim under the canopy of leaves, it was more than sufficient for them to avoid the little undergrowth that managed to grow here. 

The trip back was as easy as the flight into the forest had been troubled. Descending the hill on which the great tree stood they saw no creature bigger than a squirrel, and heard none louder than a bird. With bright green leaves rustling in the morning breeze, the Forbidden Forest could have been any English wood in spring, if the trees in any other English wood had stood uncut for millennia. 

They crossed the stream, and passed the pit where they had dug the clay for the golems. Then they came to the clearing. The warmth of the sunlight was welcome. 

More welcome still was the sight of their wands on the grass where they had dropped them. Harry grabbed his. "Lumos!" Light flared. He extinguished it, then recast the spell that set the defensive wards around the campsite. 

Hermione disappeared into the tent and came out with shorts and a sweatshirt, and a bar of soap. "I'm going down to the stream to take a bath." 

"I'll come and, and guard you, Hermione." 

"I'll be fine, Ron, I've got my wand." They watched her retreating back and noticed how her curves moved as her weight shifted from one leg to the other. 

Ron shivered. "I didn't bring any extra clothes." 

"Neither did I. Let's make a fire, then we'll check when the golems will get here with food and clothes." 

The previous evening's abbreviated bonfire had consumed little of the wood the golems had chopped. They carried a few logs to the fire pit, logs that seemed much heavier than they had the night before. Harry's fire spell soon had a blaze going. 

"You want me to check the golems, Ron?" 

Ron nodded. Harry concentrated, and was with the golems. 

They had passed the last rest spot of the day before, but they hadn't rested. Harry opened his eyes back at camp. 

"Everything's fine, Ron. Ten minutes, maybe, and they haven't dropped the picnic basket." 

"Any, um, trouble?" 

"None at all." Harry noticed Ron's expression. "Don't worry, Ron, no one else will ever know." 

Hermione was trudging up from the stream, hair dripping but clean. They watched her in the baggy sweatshirt. Ron wished he had paid more attention earlier. Harry cursed himself for giving his real glasses and not the copy to the golem. He'd imagined her more than he had seen her. 

"Great, a fire. Hey, you two can take a bath and get dressed now." 

"Hermione, the golems have our clothes, and they've got breakfast for all of us." Harry said. "If you don't mind I think I'll eat first and then change. If you don't like what you see, look the other way." 

She sniffed. "Easy enough to overlook. I'm going to check the golems" She closed her eyes. "Almost here. I'll set up the picnic blanket." 

"Oh, my." Where they had eaten the day before the dishes had been broken and trodden into the mud. Most of the checkered cloth was there, but had been shredded by teeth and claws. "Well, the silverware has to be here. Help me find it and I'll wash it off." 

Hermione was at the stream with the bent flatware when the three golems arrived. The boys took control of theirs and commanded them to pass over their clothing. Harry put on his glasses right away, but the rest of the clothes they draped over the woodpile. 

Ron looked at the underwear his golem handed over and wrinkled his nose. "I'm going to have to wash this before I wear it." His ears reddened slightly. "It's all sticky." 

Harry laughed. "Must be my fault, I mean its fault," pointing at the golem. He glanced at Ron. "Oh, lighten up Ron, my underwear's all sticky too. We'll rinse it out together." 

They ordered the golems to sit down and stay quiet. Then they opened the picnic hamper. Cold sausage and cheese, slices of roast beef, fresh-baked rolls, and hot chocolate in a jar enchanted to keep it piping hot, made by some Arabian wizards who marked each jar with their symbol of a genie coming out of a lamp. 

Hermione arrived with the silverware. She went into the tent with her golem, and came out five minutes later to find the boys gorging themselves. 

"Hermione, come eat." 

"I'm over here, that's the golem." 

Ron looked. The fully dressed Hermione now had wet hair, while the one in the sweatshirt had dry hair. "You dressed the golem?" 

Hermione shrugged. _Well_, Ron thought, _girls always like dressing up dolls_. 

In a half hour they had filled their stomachs, though the basket still contained enough for several meals. 

Harry stood up and stretched. Hermione, seated on the grass beside him, looked at him with an expression that reminded Ron of how she had looked examining a rockworm specimen in Care of Magical Creatures. 

"I'm for a bath and fresh clothes before we undo the golems. You coming, Ron?" 

The stream was icy, and they had to submerge several times and scrub themselves with bunches of grass to clean off all the fragments of leaves that had stuck to them during their night in the tree. Their underwear needed several rinsings, too. The wrung it out and hung both pairs side by side on a branch. Harry waved his wand at it and pronounced a dehydration spell. 

The cloth seemed to jump slightly, and Harry staggered and fell against Ron. 

"Harry! Are you all right?" 

"Sorry, Ron. I'm okay, but we'd better undo the golems soon. I'm too weak to even cast a dehydration spell." 

"Sit down on the rocks, there, and I'll do it." 

"Save your magic, Ron. If we're all too weak to undo the golem spell, we're in really big trouble. We'll just put on our pants, and hang our undies by the fire." 

The slope to the fire seemed much steeper than earlier. Hermione was seated on a log by the fire, studying the red spell book. "How are you two feeling? Weak?" They nodded. "Me, too. The book says it will pass as soon as the golem spell is undone." 

"What do we need to do, Hermione?" 

"It's two parts. The first undoes the golem. It's really simple - just three passes and four lines, see? We should get our strength back after that. But even so, the clay is still attuned. Like I told you earlier, someone could still use the clay to make golems of us again, or even voodoo dolls. So we have to unmake the linkage. That's harder. You have to cut a knot of seven-stranded cord, pour water from a goat's horn, and mark the Seal of Solomon. And look here, it says what I remembered about 'to your clay return.'" 

"Well, let's walk the golems down to the pit and get started." 

Hermione stood. They each looked at their golems, sent their commands, and the three creatures of clay walked toward their birthplace. The young wizards followed behind, slowly. Ron paused to pick up the shovel they had used to dig the clay for the golems.. 

A few minutes later they were by the pit in the stream bank. The babble of the brook mixed with the songs of the birds, and the morning sunlight was bright on the flowers that bloomed along the banks. Ron thought irrelevantly, _What a beautiful place to die_. 

"Oh, I can't do it. It will be just like killing them!" Hermione seemed on the verge of tears. 

Harry put his arms around her. "Hermione, they're just dolls." 

"I know, but I just can't. Could you do it, Harry?" 

"I would if I could, Hermione, but I can't. I did a few spells earlier and now I'm just too weak. But maybe Ron can?" 

"Of course. Just tell me what I have to do, Hermione." 

"We just have to make them lie down. They you do this spell." She fumbled with the book. "Then this one. You have to repeat the spells for each of them. Here's the stuff." She pulled from her pocket a horn with thick line wrapped around it. "I've already made the knots. Use water from the stream." 

Harry glanced at Ron. "All right, Hermione. Hermione, if you could tell your golem to take its clothes off and lie down?" 

She clung to him, and the golem slowly removed the sweatshirt and shorts. Harry stared at it. He wanted to memorize the curves of its form, which he wouldn't be seeing again. Ron took the clothes from it. When Hermione opened her eyes, he handed them to her. 

She took them with the expression of a mother just handed the clothes of her drowned daughter, and burst into tears. 

"Hermione, make it lie down. Make it lie down. All right. Now come with me, back to the fire." Harry looked at the pit in the clay with the golem lying in it. His golem sat down then laid its head beside that of the female golem, arms at its sides. One hand sought that of the other golem, found it, clasped it. 

"Do it, Ron, please. We're going back to camp." 

Ron watched Hermione and Harry go. Ron's golem lay down beside Harry's. Ron paused. Harry wouldn't be tuning in again. Another command, and his golem grasped the hand of Harry's. 

Ron checked the book again. _Which golem first?_ Well, what if his strength ran out halfway? _Mine first, then_. Three passes, four verses. He raised his wand and spoke clearly. 

It was like watching himself melt. The color left the doll and it looked like an image in clay. The details started to soften, smallest first - the eyelashes slumped, the hair collapsed against the head, the whole thing started to flatten. 

The weakness that had been getting worse all morning vanished. He felt like a boy again, and laughed. The golem wasn't him, it was only a doll made for a single purpose, and it had worked. _We pulled it off. _

Next Hermione's golem. _Buck her up a bit, too._ Again the color fled and the same transformation happened. 

Finally there was only Harry's golem, the image of living, breathing flesh, lying between the two dolls of clay. 

Ron squatted at the golem's head. Almost without thinking he reached out and traced the lightning-bolt scar with one finger, then combed his fingers through the black hair. The forehead was still warm, and he could see a pulse in the throat. Curious, Ron placed his palm over the left breast. He could feel the beating of a heart, though he knew the golem didn't have one. He looked into the green eyes, moved his head to one side and noticed how the eyeballs tracked him. _An amazing simulation_. He felt the nipple harden under his hand. and looked away from the green eyes, to the chest, and down the trunk. _All the reflexes are still working_, Ron thought, _and wow, no wonder my golem felt sore_. 

He stood up, gave the golem a last glance, and resolutely lifted his eyes from it. He made the passes and said the words over the third golem. Not without reluctance. 

Now the second spell, the hard one. He paused. Hermione had said that now, before the linkage was unmade, the clay could be used to make other golems. He looked around. He was alone by the stream. 

Ron quickly took out his pocket knife and knelt beside Hermione's golem. _A rib_, he thought, _the symbolism is right_. He ran his fingers over where a nipple had slumped atop the curve of what had been a breast, down the torso to faint ridges of the rib cage. He stabbed the knife in, and with two quick slices traced the shadow of a floating rib to carve out a wedge of clay. 

He'd been afraid he'd find bone and blood, but the golem was merely clay inside. Perhaps it had always been, even when it acted alive. The clay rib carefully went into a pocket of his robe. 

He reached over to Harry's golem. The clay had not yet lost much definition. His hand paused over the rib cage, then moved lower, passed the navel, lower, and dropped. His fingers encircled gently and lifted, and the knife easily severed the clay at the root. It came away in his hand. He wrapped it in his handkerchief and put in his breast pocket, over his heart. 

_Perhaps I can bake these in the campfire_, Ron thought. _Even if I never make another golem, they would be nice to have_. 

He rose, then knelt again, over his own golem. "Sorry, buddy." He quickly extracted a rib. 

Ron stood. He cut a knot, dropped the threads on his golem, filled the goat's horn with the cold clear water of the stream and sprinkled it all over his image. He traced the Seal of Solomon on the golem's chest, then raised his wand and said the incantation. 

He had expected the image to run like wax, but there was no visible change. A detection spell, though, showed there was no magic left in the clay. 

Ron performed the rite two more times. The detection spell showed negative for each, and then for the entire pit. Ron picked up the shovel. His golem had excavated a good bit more clay than needed the day before, and he shoveled it on top of the images, covering them. Then he stomped on the mound, heedless of the mud that splashed on his clothes, trying not to think of the effigies being crushed under his heels.. 

Finally the mound was almost level. _It looks like any other grave_, Ron thought. He looked around to fix the place in his mind. He'd want to return here, someday. There a waterfall, over there a pair of huge oaks, there a bright yellow splash of daffodils. Ron paused. He walked over to the daffodils, picked an armful, carried them back and strewed them over the burial place. 

Ron put the shovel over his shoulder, and headed back to camp and the others. They had a whole afternoon of freedom before returning to Hogwarts, and who knew what might yet happen? 

* * *

The End, (8/8)   
of **_The Scent of Trouble _**

_ Note the usual disclaimers apply: characters are J.K. Rowling's and used without permission; you may archive if you tell me, if you do not charge, and if you include "author Caipora (o_caipora@hotmail.com)". _

The golems and the Restricted Shelves are mine; if you want to use them for your own efforts let me know. 

Many thanks to all those who provided comment and encouragement, particularly those who laughed at the jokes in questionable taste, and to Sara Ann who wrote to say she liked the description of the magic of trees at the start of chapter 4. 

This is my first fanfic. If you enjoyed it, please recommend it to your friends. 

**Content warning, rather too late at this point:** This **last chapter** is "**NC17**" or "**R**". Prior chapters may have **nudity**. Eeek. There was potentially offensive material in earlier chapters; however if you were too young for it you wouldn't have understood it. 


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